Russell Field

Re-Entering the Sporting World: China's Sponsorship of the 1963 Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO)

Prior to the 2008 Olympics, Chinas most sustained support of an international multi-sport event came in 1963 when it contributed significantly to the financing of and then dominated the medals table at the inaugural Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO), held in Jakarta. GANEFO is a singular moment through which to understand politics and sport in the 1960s. This article is a consideration of Chinas role in GANEFO, and the Wests response to Chinas involvement. It explores the ways in which China used the event to navigate issues of international and regional geopolitics, and considers the diplomatic and sporting corridors within which GANEFO resonated. GANEFO was a platform through which geopolitical tensions were revealed, and China engaged in propaganda campaigns directed at the West and positioned itself to win allies among the decolonising countries of Asia and Africa – astride the artificial boundary that separated the Second and Third Worlds. Chinas interest in and the Wests response to GANEFO reflected the ways in which anti-communist Cold War politics were conflated with racialised, post-colonial discourses and tension between Second World powers.

Constructing the Preferred Spectator: Arena Design and Operation and the Consumption of Hockey in 1930s Toronto

To compete in the burgeoning entertainment economy of the late 1920s, entrepreneurs built sport spaces that projected an aura of middle-class respectability. In Toronto, Conn Smythe and the executives of Maple Leaf Gardens designed and operated their new arena (built in 1931) to anticipate and produce respectable spectators at a particular intersection of class, gender, and ethnic expectations. From the outset, this meant locating the new arena in the neighbourhood of another civic institution that was wooing the respectable middle-class consumer, Eatons College Street department store. Ultimately, Smythe not only built a grander (and larger) arena than any previously erected in Toronto but also ran it in an appreciably different fashion. Maple Leaf Gardens was operated in such a way as to gender and racialize all who entered. Although sports spectating, and ice hockey in particular, was a predominantly male pastime, Smythe sought to cloak it in feminine norms of respectability.

The ties that bind: a 2003 case study of Toronto's sport elite and the operation of commercial sport.

Between 1995 and 2003 the number of commercial sports teams in Toronto, Ontario increased from five to 25. A 2003 case study of the ownership of these teams reveals that the expansion of the Toronto sport market was accompanied by a concentration of ownership in the hands of two corporations: Rogers Communications and Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment. This case study examines the interconnections between the key individuals in these two corporations and the boards of directors of their key stakeholders, what is termed here the ‘Toronto sport elite’. The elite are linked to corporate boards of directors outside sport, the countrys dominant media outlets and financial institutions, and political power brokers. This group exerts oligopolistic control over commercial sport in Toronto, a situation that has important consequences for the nature of sport and physical activity in the city. These include limited choices for sport consumers, the continued marginalization of womens and ‘amateur’ sport, and the allocation of public funds towards privately-held entertainment complexes at the expense of publicly accessible recreation facilities. A postscript that updates this research to 2006 is appended to the case study.

Splitting the World of International Sport: The 1963 Games of the New Emerging Forces and the Politics of Challenging the Global Sport Order

‘The Third World was not a place,’ Vijay Prashad (2007, p. xv) notes at the outset of The Darker Nations. ‘It was a project.’ A visible, if now little remembered, sporting manifestation of this project was the Games of the New Emerging Forces (or GANEFO), an explicit attempt to link sport to the politics of anti-colonialism. This international multi-sport event, which took place in Jakarta, Indonesia, on 10–22 November 1963, attracted approximately 3000 athletes and officials from—but not necessarily officially representing—48 nations. They met in the Indonesian capital and competed in 20 athletic events (virtually all of them Olympic and Western sports) as well as cultural festivities. Athletes hailed primarily from recently decolonized countries in Asia and Africa (as well as former colonies in Latin America), which were labelled the ‘new emerging forces’ by Indonesian President Sukarno who created GANEFO as part of his attempt to situate his nation as a regional power.

Canada and the Pan-American Games

Abstract Canadians have been involved in every edition of the Pan-American Games since they were inaugurated in Buenos Aires in 1951. That participation has provided thousands of Canadian athletes, coaches, and officials memorable international experiences. But the focus of Canadian involvement with the Pan-Ams has been the staging of games as a strategy for city building, city branding, and infrastructural investment. This paper examines the Pan-American Games of Winnipeg in 1967 and 1999 and Toronto 2015 as exemplars of that strategy. It argues that with the successes of those games, major games hosting has become virtually an article of faith of Canadian sport policy.

‘To remember is to resist’: an introduction

It was an event full of poignant moments. One in particular seemed perfectly framed, both visually and historically. On stage, Tony Suze stood behind a podium almost as tall as he is. A soft-spoken man, reluctant to thrust himself into the spotlight, his story of spending more than 15 years as a political prisoner on Robben Island in apartheid-South Africa – and the highly organized soccer league that he and his fellow prisoners created and competed in on the Island – transfixed an audience of 150 post-lunch conference-goers. Nearing the end of his tale, wearied by illness, jet lag and the weight of the story he was telling, Tony paused, put his head in his hands, and gave in to his own overwhelming emotions. The discussion on the anti-apartheid movement and sport for which Tony was the final act also included American scholars Richard Lapchick and Charles Korr who recounted their own engagements with sport and South Africa’s apartheid regime. The panel was moderated by Abdul Moola, a South African expatriate who remained active in the African National Congress (ANC) while raising a family in Canada. As Tony wavered, Abdul walked quietly but purposefully across the stage and silently put his arm around Tony, a lifelong member of the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC). With the audience hushed, unsure of how to honour the raw emotions so unfamiliar to academic meetings, another invited guest strode towards the podium. Opening keynote speaker Harry Edwards, the founder of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, moved towards the front of the room. Standing below the stage, Harry offered Tony a bottle of water, his six-foot, eight-inch frame nearly eye-to-eye with the two South Africans on stage. And so the moment was captured: resistors and activists; protestors and the punished; ANC and PAC; the north and the south; the past in the present. The occasion which led to this remarkable moment was a gathering of historians and sociologists of sport along with leisure studies and disability studies scholars for a threeday conference – ‘To Remember is to Resist’: 40 Years of Sport and Social Change, 1968–2008 – hosted by the University of Toronto and Humber College in May 2008. This event was important for bringing together some too-often disparate sub-disciplines in the study of sport, physical activity and recreation, as well as for remembering and celebrating the achievements of some of the men and women who fought for progressive change both within and through sport. The timing of this event was not coincidental, recognizing as it did the 40th anniversary of the high-profile protest of African-American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos and their black-gloved raised fists on the victory podium of the 200m sprint (and the less-prominent protest of Australian Peter Norman, the silver medallist in that