Science & Tech Quote by Avery Brundage

Brundage’s line tries to launder sport into the same moral category as science and music: borderless, “above politics,” automatically ennobling. It’s a clever move, because it frames international competition as neutral exchange rather than strategic theater. If sport is like science, then rules are rules, results are truth, and the messy stuff - nationalism, money, ideology - becomes an annoying distortion instead of the main event.

That’s the subtext: a plea for institutional insulation. Brundage, as an Olympic power broker with a famously rigid view of amateurism, is defending the idea that sport can function as a kind of clean language between nations. “International phenomenon” is managerial phrasing, not poetic; it reduces crowds, flags, and rivalries into a system that can be administered. The comparison to music is especially telling: music can carry identity and propaganda, but it also sells the fantasy of harmony. Sport, in his telling, is a shared score.

Context sharpens the edge. Brundage’s Olympic tenure unfolded amid the Cold War, decolonization, and boycotts - decades when the Games were repeatedly weaponized as soft power. His insistence on sport’s purity often sounded less like idealism than control: keep politics out, but also keep athletes and emerging nations from redefining what the Olympics are for. The quote works because it offers a comforting fiction - the world can compete without confessing what it’s competing about.