Christopher Gaffney, a geographer and clinical associate professor at New York University, presented “Olympic Latin America: From Colonized Bodies to Neo-liberal Urbanization” in the Guthart Cultural Center Theater on Wednesday, Oct. 30. The event explored the political impact that sports mega-events, such as the Olympics and the World Cup, have on Latin American countries.

Gaffney recounted the history of the Olympic Games and their modern-day implications in Latin American cities. He explained how the modern Olympic movement began as a “neo-colonialist ideology” in Europe but was quickly adopted in Latin America because of the “transnational business connections that were emerging through British mercantilism.” 

Gaffney discussed how during the Cold War era, countries used sports in their national identities to create alliances and project their power to the world. This was the case for Cuba under Fidel Castro’s regime. 

“It’s well known that Castro used baseball and the Cuban sports machine in their alliances with the Soviet Union as a way of outward expression of national power,” Gaffney said. “If you don’t have power in your military or your economy, you can certainly develop it in the sporting context.”

Gaffney then shifted to the modern-day view of sports mega-events in Latin America, arguing that the Olympics and the World Cup have been the “leading edge of global capitalism and neo-colonialism.” 

He used the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, both held in Brazil, to illustrate how sports have essentially become “moneymakers” for FIFA and the International Olympic Committee (IOC). 

At the World Cup, FIFA exploited Brazil’s “sense of rhythm” and eliminated their cultural traditions by prohibiting instruments and drums in the stadiums. Two years later, Brazilians were removed from their homes in order to build the Olympic landscape. 

“The implicit utopia of the Olympics is an explicit dystopia for those who are in the way of the spectacle,” Gaffney said.

Gaffney concluded by describing how boycotting and resisting the Olympics can open “new ways of imagining the world.” While he suggests that the world does not need the Olympics, he said the IOC and FIFA need people to continue to buy into their mega-events. 

“If we open up new ways of thinking about sport, we can open different conversations about how we can move forward into a more egalitarian sporting world,” he said.

Gaffney thought that turning off the television and decreasing ratings would be how boycotting the Olympics would work, since the IOC makes most of its money from NBC.

“They never open the gaze to talk about the city context unless it’s about tourism,” he said. “It is important to not watch the games and to not have that narrative being fed into your head. Most of us are not thinking our sporting choices as political choices, but they are.”

As the co-director of the Latin American and Caribbean studies program, Brenda Elsey, also an associate political science professor at Hofstra University, said she immediately wanted [Gaffney] to come to Hofstra after he moved to NYU. 

“I have two classes, one on Latin America and a freshman seminar on sports and politics,” she said. “There’s really no better person to bring in for this event.”

Ben Cohn, a sophomore anthropology major, enjoyed the lecture, saying it was “well-spoken and very informative.” The main thing that stood out to him was how much the IOC “hides from the general population, such as the maltreatment of trainees and the murder of children.”

Junior English major Amara Leonard attended this event as part of Elsey’s class on Latin American and Caribbean studies. 

“It was interesting to learn how the Olympics has deeper controversies underlying the event and that these are important issues that deserve to be addressed with the public,” she said.

Griffin Schmoyer, a first-year journalism major, was intrigued by how Brazil redirected money from their national museum to fund the Maracanã Stadium for the 2016 World Cup. That museum burned down in 2018 due to a lack of maintenance. 

“You would think that a country would want to hang on to its history, especially with such an old building with so much history,” he said. “But the glory of holding the Olympics overshadowed that.”