A few weeks ago I sat down for an interview with Russell Field, a professor in the University of Manitoba’s kinesiology department, to talk about an academic paper he had been writing on the GANEFO games.
The Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO) was a sporting event organized by Indonesia in 1962, ostensibly as games for emerging nations. In fact, GANEFO was held in direct response to the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) suspension of Indonesia from the committee, which in turn was a response to the exclusion of Taiwanese and Israeli athletes from the 1962 Asian Games.
First held in Djakarta, Indonesia in 1963, up to 51 countries were (unofficially) represented as approximately 3,000 athletes and officials participated. A second Asian GANEFO games occurred in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in 1966, but that would be the last of the GANEFO events.
What attracted Field to researching GANEFO was its outside or “rebel” status: “[I look for] opportunities for expressing dissent or resistance to a dominant way of imagining how sports should be organized. So an example is the games from Indonesia in 1963.”
In the case of the GANEFO, there was power mongering involved by multiple parties — not only the Indonesian government. “Sporting, I would argue, is always political — small ‘p’ political,” Field said.
Field explained what drew the specific ire of the IOC.
“The international sports movements at the time were explicitly opposed to the involvement of capital ‘P’ politics in sports. And because they had the power of who could and could not compete, they were able to define what they meant by that and who was and wasn’t excluded.”
The politically active atmosphere of the ’60s, with the Cold War still silently raging, made GANEFO important to politics and sports, but today it has been overshadowed by other events that occurred in the same period — from the integration of black athletes into professional leagues, to social and political shifts occurring on an international stage.
“In 1968 you had the Black Power movement in the United States explicitly expressing itself on the Olympic podium, when John Carlos and Tommie Smith gave raised fists on the victory podium for the 200 metres,” Fields explained. He added, “A whole host of countries in Africa and Asia [were] becoming newly independent. De-colonization was underway and these countries had to be incorporated into international sport.”
Field notes that sport often becomes a political weapon. The International Olympic Committee saw the GANEFO movement as a threat and took action by suspending athletes who partook from Olympic events. However, six months after the games, Indonesia contacted the IOC and requested to be reinstated so that they could compete in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Indonesia was reinstated thanks in no small part to political pressure from its allies, most significantly Japan.
The 1964 Tokyo Olympics took place with Indonesia represented, and GANEFO collapsed a few years later. The legacy GANEFO left behind was evidence of the political volatility of sports, and how sporting organizations influence international politics, and vice versa.
