National participation controversies
No German team was allowed at the 1948 Summer Olympics in London or the Winter Games in St. Moritz. Brundage was anxious to reintegrate Germany into the Olympic movement once the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany, through Brundage's lifetime) was formed in 1949. Soon after the state's formation, its National Olympic Committee approached the IOC, seeking recognition, but there was still much animus towards Germany. Just prior to the IOC session in Vienna in 1951 (Brundage was still vice president), the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) also formed an NOC and requested recognition. This created controversy, as the Federal Republic and its NOC claimed to represent both West and East Germany, but did not control the latter. Despite lengthy discussions, no resolution was reached in 1951, and the matter was put over until February 1952, when a negotiating session was scheduled for Copenhagen. Although the East Germans came to Copenhagen, they refused to attend the session, which was eventually cancelled by Edström after the IOC officials and West Germans waited for hours in vain. The German team which competed in Helsinki that summer was entirely West German (with Saarland, then a French protectorate, competing as an independent Saar team).
In 1954, the East Germans resumed their attempts at recognition. The following year, after Brundage received assurances that the East German NOC was not government-run, the IOC voted to recognize it, but required that both East and West Germany (as well as the Saar) compete as part of a single German team in 1956. East Germany sent only 37 athletes to the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, and they lived and trained separately from their West German counterparts. For the Summer Olympics at Rome in 1960, under continuing IOC insistence that the two states send a single team, East Germany contributed 141 of the 321 athletes; competitors from both states lived in the same area of the Olympic Village. At the opening ceremony at Rome, Italian president Giovanni Gronchi marveled, much to Brundage's delight, that the IOC had obtained the German reunification which politicians had been unable to secure; Brundage responded, "But in sport, we do such things." Brundage saw the German participation as symbolic of the potential for the Olympic Games to overcome divisions to unite.
Despite the construction of the Berlin Wall beginning in 1961, which increased tensions between East and West, Brundage was successful in securing a joint German team for the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Nevertheless, the East Germans, supported by IOC members from Warsaw Pact nations, aspired to have their own team. They made a major breakthrough when the IAAF (led by the Marquess of Exeter, the former Lord Burghley) recognized a separate East German team beginning with the 1966 European Athletics Championships. The East Germans did their best to get Brundage's support, and, at the IOC session at Mexico City in 1968, they were granted full membership, with their own team under their own flag, which they displayed on West German soil four years later at the opening ceremony at Munich. Brundage, while finally supporting full membership for East Germany, considered the matter a defeat for Olympic ideals.
Although Tsarist Russia had sent athletes to the Olympic Games, after the Soviet Union was formed, it declined to participate, considering the Olympics bourgeois. As early as 1923, the IOC attempted to lure the Soviets back into the fold; Brundage visited the USSR in 1934. He was impressed by the progress which had been made there since a visit he had made in 1912 after competing in Stockholm. Despite his anti-communism, Brundage wanted the Soviets to join the Olympic movement. According to Guttmann, "When Brundage had to choose between his hostility to communism and his commitment to the ideal of Olympic universality, he chose the latter. He wanted the Russians [sic] in the Olympics, communists or not."
During World War II, Brundage wrote to other IOC members that he had no objection to Soviet involvement in international sports, with representation on the IOC, if the USSR joined the international sports federations (ISFs). The IOC required that an NOC be independent of the government of the territory which it represents; there were concerns a Soviet NOC would not be. This was a problem not unique to communist states; a number of Latin American countries were starting to bring the local NOCs into the political structure, with an official naming the NOC chair—who might even be the country's political leader. This mixture of sports and politics worried Brundage.
Beginning in 1946, the Soviets began to join international federations; in 1951 their NOC was recognized by the IOC, and they began Olympic competition the following year. As few Soviet sports officials were internationally known, the IOC had little alternative than to accept the nominees of the USSR's government if they wished to have Soviet IOC members. The Soviet members were believers in sport, and completely loyal to their nation and to communist ideals. They quickly became the leaders of the IOC members from behind the Iron Curtain, who voted in accord with the Soviet members. Brundage visited the USSR at Soviet invitation (though at his own expense) in 1954. He deemed the nation's physical education program as "creating the greatest army of athletes the world has ever seen," warning (as he would often through the 1950s) that Americans were by comparison soft and unfit. Brundage found his view, often expressed in the press, that physical education and competitive sports made for better citizens, especially in the event of war, more enthusiastically embraced in the Soviet Union than in the United States. According to David Maraniss in his account of the 1960 Rome Games, Brundage's admiration for the Soviet Union's sports programs "in some ways mirrored his response two decades earlier to his encounters with Nazi Germany".
On his return, he related in an article for The Saturday Evening Post that he had confronted Soviet officials with information from defectors stating that the USSR was running year-round training camps and giving athletes material inducements for success. He also repeated the Soviet response, which questioned the defectors' integrity: "These men are deserters, traitors. Would you attach any truth to their statements had they been Americans and had turned against your country?" Since Brundage did not comment on the response, there was a storm of controversy in the press, which accused Brundage of being a Soviet dupe.
Despite the evident conflicts between amateurism and the Soviet system in which athletes received salaries and property at state expense, allowing them to train full-time, Brundage took no action against the USSR or Warsaw Pact nations with similar systems; when challenged on this point, he argued that Western nations did similar things, citing athletic scholarships as an example. The Soviet system remained in place.
The Republic of China, which then governed the mainland, had joined the Olympic movement in 1924, when the China National Amateur Athletic Federation was recognized by the IOC as the nation's NOC. China participated in the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, as well as in Berlin four years later and the first post-war Olympics at London in 1948. When the communists were successful in the Chinese Civil War and established the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, most NOC members fled the mainland for the island of Taiwan. This left China with two rival NOCs, one on the mainland and one on Taiwan, each claiming to represent the whole of China.
Matters came to a head in 1952, when the mainland NOC (the All-China Athletic Federation), considering itself a continuation of the pre-1949 committee, wrote to the IOC stating that it desired to participate in the Helsinki Olympics to be held that year. As the Taiwanese also proposed to send a team, this conflicted with IOC rules stating that only one committee could represent a country, and both Chinese groups were unwilling to negotiate with the other, or to send a joint team. After considerable deliberation, the IOC decided that if either committee was recognized by the ISF for a sport, the committee could send athletes to participate in events in that discipline. In protest, Taiwan withdrew from the Games; the PRC sent a team to Helsinki, though it arrived ten days after the start of the Games. Brundage, president-elect when the decision was made to allow PRC athletes to compete, argued against the decision to allow mainland participation before its NOC was recognized, but he was overruled by his colleagues.
In 1954, the Brundage-headed IOC, in a narrow vote, recognized both committees, thus allowing both states to participate at Melbourne. Only the PRC's committee initially accepted, but when the Taiwanese NOC changed its mind and decided to send a team to the Games, the mainlanders withdrew in protest. Brundage took the position that despite similar concerns about state sponsorship as with the USSR, once the PRC's committee was recognized and reported to the IOC that all eligibility rules were observed, the international committee had to accept that unless it had evidence to the contrary. He was frustrated by the continuing controversy, considering the squabble a distraction from the goal of advancing the Olympic movement.
When continuing efforts to exclude the Taiwanese failed, in 1958 the mainlanders withdrew from the IOC. The following year, the IOC ruled the Taiwanese could not compete under the name Republic of China Olympic Committee, but would have to compete under some other name which did not imply they governed sports in China. Brundage and Exeter both advocated for the ruling, which they compared to having an Italian NOC represent only Sicily. The press interpreted the ruling to mean that Nationalist China had been expelled from the Olympic movement, and for the next year, the anti-communist Brundage found himself under attack in the press as a communist sympathizer. Although United States State Department officials attempted to persuade them to stand on principle, Taiwanese officials decided to participate in the Rome Games, hoping to secure China's first medal, and believing their NOC's continued presence helped keep mainland China out of the Games. Taiwanese athletes competed under the designation Formosa (an alternate name for Taiwan), and caused a sensation by briefly displaying a sign reading "Under Protest" at the opening ceremony; when Yang Chuan-Kwang took the silver medal in the decathlon, he was not allowed to display the Nationalist Chinese flag at the medals ceremony.
Brundage, through his tenure, slowly came around to the position advocated by Iron Curtain IOC members, that the important thing was to recognize the mainland, with Taiwan of less importance. Although the mainland Chinese were invited by the Munich Olympic organizers to send an observer delegation to Munich (they declined due to the Taiwanese presence), it was not until 1975, after Brundage's departure as president, that the PRC applied to rejoin the Olympic movement. The PRC again participated at the 1980 Winter Games at Lake Placid and then the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles; the island NOC competed as the Republic of China in 1968 and 1972; when refused permission to compete under that name in 1976, after Brundage's death, it boycotted the 1976 and 1980 games, returning in 1984 as Chinese Taipei.
In the late 1950s, protest against South Africa's apartheid regime reached the stage of seeking to exclude the nation from international sport. In 1956, government rules requiring separate events for whites and non-whites in South Africa were issued; non-whites received poorer facilities. Brundage initially opposed taking any action. The run-up to the 1960 Rome Olympics had seen tumult in South Africa, including the Sharpeville massacre and a crackdown on the African National Congress. Activists attempted to persuade Brundage that South Africa should be excluded from the Games. Brundage initially took the word of South African sport leaders that all citizens were able to compete for a place on the Olympic team, and that non-white South Africans simply were not good enough.
The drive towards a boycott was fueled by the large number of African nations which became independent in the late 1950s and early 1960s. To prevent the new nations from overwhelming the ISFs, Brundage proposed that the federations adopt weighted voting systems to allow earlier members to wield disproportionate influence, which some did. By 1962, with the suspension of South Africa from FIFA (the association football governing body), Brundage had come around to the position that South Africa's racist policies were inconsistent with the ideals of the Olympic movement. At the 1963 IOC session in Baden-Baden (moved there from Nairobi when Kenyan officials refused to issue visas to South African representatives), the IOC voted to suspend South Africa from the Olympics unless its NOC and government adopted non-discrimination policies regarding Olympic selection. This did not come to pass, and South Africa did not participate in 1964. In 1968, Brundage and the IOC invited a South African team (supposedly to be multiracial) to the Mexico City Games, but under a threatened boycott and with evidence of minimal South African compliance, withdrew it.
In 1971, the IOC, at its Amsterdam session, voted to strip the South African NOC of recognition. Although Brundage had hoped to keep South Africa within the Olympic movement, he believed that those who sought its expulsion had made the stronger case. South Africa did not return to the Olympics until the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, after the end of its apartheid government.
A parallel problem was that of Rhodesia, the British colony which had unilaterally declared its independence from the United Kingdom in 1965. Rhodesia had a white minority government. In May 1968, the United Nations Security Council condemned its government and asked nations not to honor its passports, and the Mexican government, set to host the Olympics later that year, complied with the ban. The IOC initially believed that sports facilities in the breakaway colony were not segregated, despite its government's policies. The proposed 16-member Olympic team included two black athletes. Because of this, Brundage supported Rhodesian participation at Mexico City, but he was overruled by the IOC; according to the head of the Rhodesian Olympic Committee, Douglas Downing, "His voice cries in a wilderness of spite." For Munich in 1972, the IOC decided to allow the Rhodesians to compete as British subjects, which by international law they were. African nations again threatened to boycott if the Rhodesians were allowed to participate, and, at its Munich session in 1972 just before the Games, the IOC narrowly voted to exclude the Rhodesians. Brundage was livid at the decision, believing that the IOC had yielded to blackmail. In 1974, after Brundage left office, the IOC found evidence of segregated facilities in Rhodesia, and it subsequently withdrew recognition from its NOC. Rhodesia returned to the Olympics in 1980 as recognized independent Zimbabwe.
