CHAPTER 1
THE DAY BEFORE the world changed, Carl Diem walked into Berlin’s new sports stadium in high spirits. It was the morning of June 27, 1914, and Diem, a gangly thirty-two-year-old, was there to visit Germany’s pre-Olympic games, a dress rehearsal for the forthcoming event.1 In two short years, athletes from across the United States and Europe would convene at the very same stadium for the real Olympic Games. Diem needed to make sure it was perfect.
No one had a bigger stake in the 1916 Olympics than Diem. The previous October, German officials had appointed him secretary of the Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games, a coalition of politicians and athletic officials tasked with setting the schedule, venue, lodging, layout, and financing for the competitions. It was a high honor for someone so young, especially given Diem’s unconventional background. As a teenager, following a short-lived career running track, he had dropped out of high school to write for newspapers.2 His critiques of Germany’s weak athletic infrastructure drew the notice of the country’s sporting elites. They elected him, at the age of twenty-one, to serve on one of Germany’s top sports organizations.3
A decade later, Diem was the face of the next Olympics. Since his appointment to the Organizing Committee, he had traveled across Germany, giving speeches to dubious sports officials about the need to prepare their teams for international competition. Germany was a gymnastics-focused country, with three times more gymnasts than any other type of athlete,4 but Diem wanted to make the country a real competitor in sports like track and field.5 The fresh-faced dropout was still distressed that at the 1912 Olympics, Germany had finished an embarrassing fifth in the national medal count.6
Diem delivered lectures in Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Cologne, courting politicians for money over high-end Rhine wines and champagne.7 At night, as trains whisked him from city to city, he stayed up late plotting out the finer details of the Olympics. And his efforts weren’t limited to his home country. He took a steamboat to America, where he met with Woodrow Wilson and gifted the US president a German sports pin.8 Later, he visited the headquarters of the International Olympic Committee in Paris and returned to Berlin with a grand plan to blanket Germany with sports fields and playgrounds.
That Saturday, Diem’s vision of an athletically elite Germany seemed to be arriving. Thousands of top athletes warmed up for track-and-field competitions.9 Germany’s head of state, Kaiser Wilhelm II, studied the crowd from a canopied box seat. During the day’s competition, the kaiser’s nephew proved the indisputable star. The twenty-one-year-old prince cruised through the distance run and the weight-throwing competitions. The press loved the spectacle, which meant so did Diem. With the backing of the kaiser, he was invincible.
No one involved could have known it then, but that spot—that gleaming new Berlin sports stadium—would, twenty-two years later, become the setting for a turning point in world history. It would become synonymous with fascism and racial discrimination; with new heights in athletic achievement and a major leap forward in radio technology; with propaganda and spectacle and social control; and, more quietly, with the birth of a regime of gender surveillance in sports.
In twenty-two years, the fates of a loose group of sports professionals—a Czech athlete who publicly transitioned gender, the organizer of a breakaway sports competition for women, a closeted queer Missourian sprinter, an ambitious American executive, a Nazi sports doctor, an aging half-Jewish bureaucrat, and Diem himself—would all collide here during one of the most notorious Olympic Games in history. The result would be the creation of an Olympic sex testing policy and apparatus that, even as its origins have been forgotten, continues to define sports—and, to an extent, society—today.
* * *
Once upon a time, this place was a patchwork of trees. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the population of Berlin, one of the largest cities in the newly formed German Empire, was exploding. The city’s elites demanded more—more space, more fresh air, and more distance from the bustle and grime of the inner city—and so they turned to the massive Grunewald Forest on the western edge of Berlin.10 Packed with conifers and birch trees, the Grunewald had, for centuries, hosted Prussian aristocrats looking to hunt wild boar and deer.11 Now rich Berliners wanted to make it their new home. On the outskirts of the forest they erected ungainly mansions, often over the protests of environmentalists, who in turn organized a Berlin Forest Protection Day to stop the development. They popularized a song that criticized the clearing of the Grunewald as a “wood auction.”12 But opposing the development was futile: around 1909, the new neighborhood drew the attention of a small group of German officials who were looking to build a stadium big enough to host the Olympics.13 These officials fixated on a grassy area just outside the forest, which had everything they needed: a mostly undeveloped area not far from downtown Berlin, populated by residents rich enough to subsidize the construction.
The German Stadium (Deutsches Stadion) opened in 1913 after a furious two hundred days of work. It was the second-largest sports venue in the world, home to a track, two gymnastics fields, a soccer field, a bicycling course, and a swimming pool.14 The German Stadium was the stuff of dreams, a symbol of its country’s new athletic prowess. Tourists flocked to it, and athletes battled to compete inside it. Carl Diem later bragged that in those days, “There was life from morning to night” at the stadium.15 When the Olympics came to town, he assumed, the German Stadium would blow away the world.
Sunday, June 28, 1914, was the second and last day of the pre-Olympic competition at the German Stadium. In the morning, sharpshooters filed onto the field for the shooting championships.16 Between rounds, marching music blared throughout the stadium. At around 11:30 in the morning, the German shooters were preparing for the end of the competition when, suddenly, the music stopped. The black, red, and white flag of the German Empire dropped to half-mast.17 The breaking news was hard to believe: a young Serbian revolutionary had killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and a close ally of the German state. Sitting in the audience, one German official, a Prussian general, reacted immediately. Diem recalled a single sentence: “This means war.”18
It did, in fact, mean war. But it would take an agonizing few weeks to get there. Exactly one month later, on July 28, the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia, activating a web of geopolitical alliances. Two days after that, Russia mobilized against the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Germany, a dutiful ally of Austria-Hungary, declared war on Russia, then on France, then on Belgium. On August 4, Britain launched its forces against Germany.
Germany’s Olympic dreams unraveled. Diem enlisted to fight in the German army that August, hoping for a swift end to the hostilities. He told reporters he would wait to send out invitations to the 1916 Olympics until there was peace. “We can be reasonably sure that modern war will not last so long,” he said.19 But it wasn’t meant to be. On October 1, German officials dissolved the Organizing Committee and suspended all events at the German Stadium. Instead, sheep grazed on the neglected field.20 The following April, when German soldiers deployed chlorine gas at Ypres, Belgium, the war entered a gruesome new phase. The 1916 Games were canceled. When the dust settled, in the final days of 1918, Germany had not just lost the war but also found itself expelled from nearly all global institutions, including the International Olympic Committee. Diem, a true believer in the Olympic project, was crushed. It was going to be a long road back.
CHAPTER 2
ZDENĚK KOUBEK GREW UP HEARING WHISPERS of independence. Born on December 8, 1913, in the Czech city of Paskov, a snow-covered village along the southeastern border with Poland, he was, technically, a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But the empire was fast losing its grip on the region. Koubek was barely six months old when Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia, sending Europe careening toward war. Koubek’s father, who worked as an overseer in the mansion of an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat, had little choice but to join the army. The empire dispatched him to the town of Plava, on the Italian border.1
With their source of income gone, Koubek’s mother and five older siblings moved some one hundred miles away to a suburb south of Brno, a small city packed with cobblestone roads, museums, movie theaters, and German restaurants. Nearly two-thirds of Brno was ethnically German,2 and many locals spoke a language that blended Czech and German.3 Under the Austro-Hungarian regime, German residents exerted near total control of the city. When a group of Czechs proposed creating the first Czech-language university in Brno, German residents responded that the Slavic “barbarians” would ruin the city’s “German” character.4 Once the war broke out, resistance became dangerous. In February 1915, the Austro-Hungarian Empire executed seven Czechs whom it accused of spreading enemy propaganda.5 It further suspended forty-seven Czech-language newspapers from publishing and required the remaining papers to run prewritten propaganda articles. “Paper after paper was strangled,” one Czech observer recalled.6 Czech critiques of the empire slipped underground, heard only in whispers on trams and in cafés.7
Huddled in their new apartment, Koubek’s family subsisted on dinners of polenta, stale bread, and—to Koubek’s particular chagrin—turnips, as the country sacrificed meat and flour to feed soldiers in the war effort. Only in 1920, two years after the close of the war, did Koubek discover such luxuries as sausage. By that time, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was no more, and the British, American, and French armies supervised the creation of a new government in Koubek’s home region, a state called Czechoslovakia. It was to be a representative democracy of over thirteen million people—a configuration of Czechs and Slovaks who had broken away from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, plus the region’s existing German, Hungarian, and Jewish populations. Change came fast.8
In 1918, the country’s new National Assembly elected its first president. Women gained the right to vote. The double-headed eagle, once a symbol of Austro-Hungarian power, disappeared from public buildings.9 Films depicting Czech soldiers who had broken away from the Austro-Hungarian forces to fight for Russia or France or Italy were screened widely across the young nation and became the basis for a new Czech national self-mythology.10 Czech-language universities opened,11 and buildings were given Czech names to erase their Germanic origins. Prague’s New German Theater rebranded as the Smetana Theater.12 In cases where politicians opted to leave relics of the old empire intact, some activists took matters into their own hands. Czech vigilantes forcibly removed a number of imperial statues, at times descending into violent clashes with ethnic Germans who tried to defend the monuments.13 In downtown Brno, a linguistic guerrilla war took hold: Germans defaced posters written in Czech, while Czechs graffitied those written in German.14
The new Czech state had no history, no self-identity. Even its most ardent supporters frequently worried about its fragility;15 those fears drove some to embrace violence. One particularly dangerous group was the legionnaires, a network of Czech soldiers who had broken away from the Austro-Hungarian army to fight for the Allies during the war. Though hailed as war heroes, some legionnaires couldn’t give up the fight, even after Czechoslovakia became independent. They instigated attacks on German, Hungarian, and Jewish residents, fearing that racial and ethnic minorities posed a threat to national cohesion.16 They once attacked the pregnant wife of a British ambassador after they heard her speak English in the street and mistook it for German.17
The legionnaires also went after leftists. On June 26, 1920, in Olomouc, a city just outside Brno, one thousand members of the left-leaning Social Democratic Party gathered for a conference.18 The legionnaires, fearful of a socialist takeover, decided to frighten them. One hundred and fifty of them left their barracks and broke up the meeting, locking the doors and fanning out across the room, guns and knives raised. One soldier stabbed the speaker in the back. The ambush inflamed the left, whose leaders began exhorting Czech people to express their “just anger.”19 It became an existential crisis for Tomáš Masaryk, the president of Czechoslovakia. But instead of punishing the legionnaires, he instructed the Social Democrats to more clearly demonstrate their loyalty to the new Czech state.
Though they were ethnically Czech, Koubek’s family didn’t have time to consider the growing pains of an independent Czechoslovakia. The family was barely staying afloat. When Koubek’s father returned home from the front lines, he struggled to find a job. Eventually, he decided to try his hand as a carriage driver in downtown Brno, hoping that the growing number of wealthy visitors to the city could help him eke out a living. Koubek, clad in boots and patched-up trousers, often rode with him on horseback.
* * *
Koubek could not quite place how, but he grew up knowing he was different. Most people perceived him as a girl, including his mother and father, who wrote that he was female on his birth certificate and who assigned him a feminine name that he would later reject. To the world, he was a girl, though eventually he’d understand himself not to be. Koubek’s mother forced him to start wearing a blue bow in his hair, which Koubek hated. He stared at himself in the mirror and scowled. He thought the bow made him look like an obedient poodle, and soon the nickname stuck: the boys at school, especially the mean ones, nicknamed him “the poodle.” In a small act of rebellion, Koubek wore trousers that he borrowed from his brothers, but he kept the ponytail and bow intact to please his parents.
Outside of class, most of the girls refused to talk to him. His only female friends were named Anka and Božka, and they had a habit of tormenting the boys. They laughed when the other kids confused zebras and rhinos in biology class or when they mixed up the names of Holy Roman emperors in history. When a classmate placed hedgehogs in a confessional stall at the local church, Anka and Božka gleefully ratted him out to their teachers. Humiliated, the boys often threatened to fight them—until Koubek stepped in. Koubek had learned to throw a fierce punch, and he used it to protect his friends. Years later, when Koubek was trying to explain his new life as a man to the general public, he claimed, perhaps with a touch of exaggeration, that he had developed a fearsome reputation throughout the school. Whenever an argument escalated into shouting, some student inevitably threatened to call him for help.
Social life in the suburbs of Brno revolved around campfires. The neighborhood kids gathered on the outskirts of the woods to bake potatoes, stage wrestling matches, and organize sprinting contests. They usually raced from a firepit to a rusted billboard advertising shoe cream somewhere in the distance—a stand-in for the finish line. The sprints were not taken lightly. The winner got to walk away with the coveted prize of four sizzling baked potatoes, and they fought hard: once, a boy Koubek’s age tripped and fell into a ditch in the middle of his run. He hobbled back to the group with a broken knee and a layer of mud clinging to his face.
Koubek was eight years old when he joined his first sprint. He had never been much of a runner, but he decided to try. From the moment he heard go, Koubek shot out ahead of the four girls he was competing against. He pictured himself as a deer, galloping away from a hunter. He was just a few meters from the finish line when someone shouted his name from behind. Koubek slowed to see what had happened. In that instant, the girl who had shouted his name leapt ahead of him. She won by just a fraction of a second. Koubek was devastated that he’d fallen for such an obvious trick. The boys whooped and hollered, savoring the rare chance to tease their most fearless classmate. Koubek choked back tears and ran straight toward the woods, not stopping until he found his way home. He resolved never to run again.
* * *
The older Koubek became, the more peculiar he found the rituals of femininity. When he was fourteen, he enrolled in a Czech convent school in Brno, where he fit in even less than before. He experimented with an embroidery class, but his designs were so disfigured that one of his teachers told him he made the angel Gabriel look like a chimney sweep. Another nun, disgusted, threw his work into the trash. The only time he felt in step with femininity was in choir class. Koubek was a soprano, and the other students always remarked that he had a beautiful voice. But one April, during his early teen years, his pitch started to drop, fast. Soon he stood out as the sole baritone in the otherwise all-girls’ choir. His teacher, who had once embraced his talents, became concerned that the sea of soft voices would be “profaned” by his “base rumbling” and decided to intervene. She wrote on Koubek’s report card that he “does not have an ear for music.” Koubek was summarily ejected from choir.
It didn’t help that Koubek’s new friends started cultivating crushes on their mediocre-looking male peers. One friend was falling for a boy whom Koubek thought gnashed his teeth too much in class. When the question turned to which boys had caught Koubek’s attention, Koubek had no answer. He didn’t know how to say he felt nothing. Why wasn’t he more like the girls, dreaming of princes in storybooks? He tried not to let it bother him, but it did. Will I ever in my life have somebody? he asked himself.
On Sundays, when suitors came over to his family’s house to court his two older sisters, his parents told him to wait outside so he wouldn’t spoil the mood. Koubek often perched at the crown of the cherry tree in his backyard, where he could stare out at the Brno countryside. There he developed an obsession with detective novels. He read every book about Leon Clifton, the popular fictional Czech detective.
From his spot on the cherry tree, Koubek also plotted out business ideas. He was nothing if not an entrepreneur. During school breaks, he bought baskets of fruit from a local farmer, and with his younger brother and dog in tow, he paraded around the neighborhood shouting “Fruuuuit for saaaale!” He sold apples and berries to his neighbors at a steep markup. Koubek was thrilled when he earned enough to make his business’s first big investment: a wagon to carry the produce.
Koubek had never run track formally, and he hadn’t run at all since that first failed sprint at the campfire in Brno. As he grew older, his contempt for sports only grew. He refused to participate even in informal athletic competitions with his friends. Role-playing games, he thought, were far more dignified than sports. On the streets of Brno, he scowled at people who jogged past him, training for some unknowable sprint. Runners were far too thin, he thought, and probably a little bit mentally unwell. Anyway, Koubek didn’t come from money. His father was barely making ends meet as it was. Having the time and money to invest in athletics was an unimaginable privilege for someone like him. “People should have more important things to worry about than competing with each other,” he huffed in a later essay.
Copyright © 2024 by Michael Waters
