People’s Olympiad

This is a poster for the People’s Week of Sport and Folklore, the People’s Olympiad, that was scheduled to take place in Barcelona between 19 and 26 July 1936. People of a number of nationalities - including Algerians, Moroccans, and Palestinians, who were colonized peoples and Jews - as well as Spaniards, Catalans, Basques, and Galicians, would take part in basketball, baseball, chess, soccer, shooting, Basque handball, and twelve other sports. The three figures holding the flag embody the Olympiad’s stated aim of racial brotherhood.

The People’s Olympiad was organized as a protest against the 1936 Olympic Games, which were to be held in Berlin in August 1936. The International Olympic Committee had awarded Berlin the games in 1931, long before Hitler came to power. Barcelona had been the main competitor. The Nazi regime quickly realized the propaganda value of the Olympics, but a campaign to get countries to boycott the Berlin games failed. 

The initiative for the Barcelona event came from the Catalan Committee for Popular Sport (Comitè Català pro Esport Popular), which included a number of sporting clubs associated with the Communist Party. (In April, the Committee organized a football tournament called the Thälmann Cup, after the German Communist imprisoned by the Nazis.)   The People’s Olympiad had the enthusiastic support of the Generalitat of Catalonia and financial support from the governments of Spain and France and the city of Barcelona. The People’s Olympiad was organized very quickly - the organizing committee had been put together only in late April 1936 – but it is estimated that some 6,000 athletes (2,000 more than in the Berlin games) from 23 countries, about a half of them from outside Spain, and 20,000 spectators had gathered in Barcelona for the event.

A rehearsal of the opening ceremony, including Pablo Casals conducting Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, was held on Montjuic on 18 July. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War meant that the competitions were cancelled, although a parade of athletes did take place on 21 July.  In the words of one member of the British team, “With our Scottish pipers at the head… the teams of all other nations represented marched in the procession, escorted by armed cars to the sports stadium. Through huge crowds we marched, crowds above whose heads a sea of fists were raised. Never before have I experienced such a thrill of pride as this.”

In a foreshadowing of later global support for the fight against fascism in Spain, between 200 and 600 of the athletes, including at least two women, chose to join the workers’ militias to fight against the military rebellion.