This article is part of the Future of the Olympics special report.

If there’s one thing the organizers of the Olympics want you to know, it’s that politics has no place in their biennial sporting event.

It’s the principle the International Olympic Committee (IOC) cited in the run-up to the Summer Games in Paris kicking off next week, when it announced that athletes from Russia and Belarus could compete, despite their countries’ participation in the invasion of Ukraine.

It’s also behind the IOC’s decision to ignore calls to prevent Israel from joining the Games over the war in Gaza.

The truth, however, is that the Olympics are political, have always been political and will always be political. Just ask Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Putin and Asterix the Gaul.

On their surface, the Games are a celebration of athleticism. Underneath, they’ve been bubbling with politics as far back as the original Olympics in ancient Greece, when city-states would use the occasion for political maneuvering and alliance-building.

Adolf Hitler watching the Olympics in Berlin in August 1936. | Fox Photos via Getty Images

The modern Games (first held, by no coincidence, in Greece on the anniversary of the country’s declaration of independence from the Ottoman Empire) may have been founded on the noblest of political principles — the promotion of international goodwill. But they were quickly run through with nationalism, propaganda, cheating and eventually even terrorism and murder.

This dark side of the Olympics was the subject of “Asterix at the Olympics Games,” the iconic 1968 comic strip by French cartoonists René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo.

In the book, tiny Asterix travels from his besieged Gaulish village to Greece to compete against muscle-bound Spartans and burly Romans.

The Romans, thoroughly thrashed and humiliated by the Greeks, are then tricked by Asterix into gulping down his village’s magic potion (the performance-enhancing drug of its day) ahead of the final race of the Olympiad.

As one Roman centurion sagely observes in the strip, “If we are to be promoted, Julius Caesar has to be pleased, and if Julius Caesar is to be pleased, you have to win the race and the palm of victory.”

Instead, the Romans are busted for cheating and Asterix is declared the winner by default.

While fiction, the Asterix cartoon was inspired by the real world, in which a succession of dictators and war criminals have used the Games to whip up populist emotions or targeted them to make a bloody point.

China’s President Xi Jinping at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games. | Julian Finney/Getty Images

Most infamously, the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler tried to use the 1936 Olympics in Berlin to celebrate his theories of racial supremacy — only to see his dream shattered by the Black American speedster Jesse Owens winning four gold medals.

The 1972 Games were the target of the Palestinian Black September terror group, which staged a violent hostage-taking in Munich’s Olympic Village, killing 11 Israelis and a West German police officer. The next Olympics in Montreal were boycotted by 29 countries in protest at New Zealand’s participation after its rugby team toured apartheid South Africa. Cold War-era boycotts then dominated the 1980 and 1984 Games in Moscow and Los Angeles, as the United States and the USSR kept their athletes at home.

More recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping have used the Olympics to legitimize and glorify their nations (and themselves).

Beijing has hosted the Games twice this century, using the 2008 Olympics to announce its arrival as a world power to the beat of 2,008 pounding drummers during an eye-popping opening ceremony. China’s 2022 Winter Games were overshadowed by calls for a boycott over Beijing’s treatment of its minority Uyghur population. 

But nobody has used the Games to their political advantage as much as Putin. After following up the 2008 Olympics in China with an invasion of parts of neighboring Georgia, the Russian leader did it again six years later.

Leaders have used the Games to whip up populist emotions. | Alexander Zemlianichenko/AFP via Getty Images

The Kremlin first orchestrated a brazen doping plot at the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014 to ensure Russia finished top of the medal table, then followed up that display of nationalism by sending “little green men” into the Crimean peninsula, kicking off a decade of brutal killing and fighting in Ukraine.

So what will happen in Paris? The 2024 Olympics have already been overshadowed by political upheaval in France after President Emmanuel Macron called a snap election last month. Other political issues that might muscle their way into the Games include the war in Ukraine, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and allegations of Chinese cheating by the U.S.

Let the Games begin? They’ve already started.