COMPETING IDEOLOGIES
Three other nations whose experience of the 1964 Olympics was shaped by politics
CHINA WITHDRAWS
The People’s Republic of China was notably absent from the 1964 Games, having withdrawn after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) placed a ban on athletes who had participated in a rival event the previous year – the Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO), created by Indonesia’s President Sukarno and held in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta. While Japan used the 1964 Games to stake a new claim in the international order, Sukarno was intent on establishing an alternative order rooted in Asian and African neutralism and anticolonialism; GAN'FO was effectively the athletics counterpart to the Bandung (or Asian-African) Conference of 1955. Indonesia and North Korea also withdrew from Tokyo 1964 because of the IOC ban. Japan had allowed its athletes to attend GANEFO, but only those of non-Olympic standard.
GERMANY UNITES
Coming fourth in the medals table in 1964, after the United States, the Soviet Union and Japan, was the United Team of Germany. This was a team of athletes from West and East Germany, which competed together at the Olympics in 1956, 1960 and 1964. Some of the difficulties in establishing the team mirrored those experienced by Japan in the run-up to the Tokyo Olympics. To the question of which of the countries’ national anthems would be used, the answer was, eventually, neither; the “Ode to Joy”, from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, was chosen instead. And to the question of which flag to use, the solution – thanks in part to IOC intervention – was to overlay the five Olympic rings onto the horizontal black, red and gold stripes of the flag of the Weimar Republic (1919–33). The United Team came to an end with the granting to East Germany of its own Olympic Committee in 1965. Germany once again became a single force at the Olympics in 1992 at Barcelona, two years after reunification.
SOUTH AFRICA EXCLUDED
South Africa was excluded from the 1964 Games after its government refused to modify its apartheid policies. The country was also barred from the subsequent Summer Games, in Mexico City in 1968, and was expelled from the Olympic Movement altogether in 1970. South African apartheid had a direct impact on sport: it included an official ban on the participation in international competitions of mixed white and non-white teams, with the result that few non-white South Africans were able to compete abroad. South Africa finally made it back into Olympic competition in 1992, at the Barcelona Games, two years after the release from prison of Nelson Mandela. One of the enduring images of the Barcelona Olympics was of the Ethiopian runner Derartu Tulu, the first black African woman to win an Olympic gold medal, holding hands with the white South African runner Elana Meyer during her victory lap.