advocacy
Just eight years after the first modern Games, the 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis revealed how quickly the celebration of athletic excellence and international unity could be reshaped by politics, nationalism, and racial ideology.
The Games were moved from Chicago to St. Louis so they could sit alongside the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, a massive World’s Fair designed to celebrate American expansion and technological progress. Instead of standing apart as a global sporting event, the Olympics were absorbed into the Fair’s political agenda. The result was a Games defined not by international cooperation, but by displays of American dominance and imperial thinking.
Participation reflected this imbalance. With the distance and cost of travel keeping most European athletes away, more than five hundred of the roughly six hundred competitors were American. Events began to feel less like an international gathering and more like a domestic showcase. Nowhere was this clearer than in the controversial “Anthropology Days”, where Indigenous and colonized peoples from around the world were made to compete in fabricated events made to “measure” their physical abilities. Framed as science, the spectacle promoted ideas of racial hierarchy and white superiority, drawing widespread criticism.
Because the Games were folded into the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the Fair already displayed Indigenous and colonized groups in “living villages” that framed them as curiosities from America’s expanding empire. People from the Philippines, Cuba, Guam, Japan, and several Native American nations were brought to St. Louis under the pretext of education, but were often treated like exhibits. The goal, according to the organizers, was to compare the “natural” athletic abilities of different “races” and measure their “civilized progress”. In reality, it was an attempt to “prove” that white Americans were inherently superior.
Anthropology Days didn’t disappear quietly. Its legacy sits at the core of Olympic politics. It demonstrated how easily athletes, especially those from marginalized or colonized communities, could be manipulated on the Olympic stage. It also revealed the contradiction at the heart of the early Olympics: the Games claimed to celebrate unity and internationalism, yet they reinforced the racial and political hierarchies of the moment.
This scandal matters because it set a precedent. It showed that hosting the Olympics wasn’t just about sport. It meant controlling the global narrative. It meant deciding whose bodies were celebrated and whose were displayed. And it meant that the Olympics could become a stage where nations project power, define identity, or, as in 1904, justify inequality.
Anthropology Days didn’t lead directly to athlete activism, but it created the conditions for it. When you see people being used as symbols instead of competitors, pushed into events that mock their cultures, and written about in ways that strip them of dignity, the need for resistance becomes clear. The scandal of 1904 is uncomfortable, but it’s foundational. It shows, from the earliest years, that the Olympics weren’t just influenced by politics; they were shaped by politics. And that tension has never left the Games.