Africa and the Olympics: Winning away from the Podium," a public talk with historian Todd Cleveland

About This Event

Vis-à-vis their continental counterparts, African Olympic teams have collectively accumulated the second fewest medals since the inception of the modern Games in 1896. Yet, for all of their seeming invisibility on the Olympic landscape, African states, athletes, and officials have, over time, effectually used the Games as a vehicle for social, political, and economic change. While Western audiences remain transfixed on how many medals their teams have earned, Africa has long been “winning” at the Olympics, often far removed from the medal podium. This talk reconstructs the ways that these various African actors have, over time, achieved these non-sporting victories. African states, athletes, and officials have utilized the Olympics to engage in transformative political activity, realize social mobility, and enhance the quality of life for individuals, communities, and entire nations. By reconstructing these historical and contemporary processes and the motivations that precipitated them, the talk complicates reductive notions of the Olympics as solely a sporting competition and, instead, considers Africa’s various forms of engagement with the Games as a series of opportunities to improve personal, communal, ethnic, national, and even continental plights.

Sponsored by the History Department and the William L. Davis, S. J. Lecture.