Summary: Murray N. Rothbard, “Some Reflections on the Olympics” (1994)

This short 1994 polemical essay is a topical column on the Lillehammer Winter Olympics, the Tonya Harding–Nancy Kerrigan scandal, and the political meaning Rothbard draws from sports culture. Its scope is not athletic analysis in a narrow sense, but a libertarian-conservative culture-war reading of the Olympics as a site where nationalism, media spectacle, victimology, legalism, and weakened institutional authority converge.

Rothbard opens by distancing himself from conventional American Olympic coverage. His first gesture is deliberately anti-chauvinist: he praises Norway’s enjoyment of its own games and its skiing success, not American triumphalism. That move prepares his broader attack on televised nationalism.

From the above it is obvious that I dissent from the American ultra-chauvinism that has always been endemic to TV coverage of the Olympics.

For Rothbard, the problem is not simply bad broadcasting but the politicization of sport. Olympic competition, he argues, ought to concern excellence, rules, and individual or team performance, not national prestige or state ideology.

Sports are supposed to be individual, or team, efforts, and should have nothing to do with government or politics, and what used to be hailed as the “Olympic ideal” was set against such emphasis on the State.

The essay’s central conceptual move is to treat the Harding–Kerrigan controversy as a cultural diagnostic. Rothbard rejects the left-liberal tendency, as he sees it, to interpret Harding’s appeal through class resentment. The conflict is instead recoded as moral rather than socioeconomic: Kerrigan represents discipline, family sacrifice, and “playing by the rules,” while Harding represents aggression, grievance, and victimological excuse-making.

The difference is not “class,” and it is disingenuous for the left to pretend otherwise.

He sharpens this distinction through nineteenth-century moral language, contrasting the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. This is one of the essay’s most revealing moves: Rothbard opposes structural or therapeutic explanations of behavior and insists on character, responsibility, and rules. His description of Harding is intentionally harsh, because he wants the scandal to stand for a larger decline in moral judgment.

The difference is character, what the nineteenth century used to call the “deserving” versus the “undeserving” poor.

The figure-skating analysis extends the same moral vocabulary into aesthetics. Kerrigan’s skating is associated with elegance and ladylike bearing, Harding’s with force without grace. Rothbard’s point is not merely that one skater was better than the other, but that figure skating itself requires a synthesis of discipline, beauty, and athletic skill.

Figure-skating is a blend of the athletic and the elegant.

The fourth section turns from Harding to institutional weakness. Rothbard attacks Olympic and skating officials for permitting Harding to compete after legal threats, and he rejects the argument that exclusion required criminal conviction. The issue, in his view, is not criminal procedure but the standards of a voluntary sporting institution.

What is this nonsense about being convicted of a crime?

Here the essay’s libertarian and Old Right impulses meet. Participation in the Olympics is treated as a privilege governed by norms of sportsmanship, not a rights-claim protected against institutional discipline. Rothbard’s nostalgia for Avery Brundage, whom he presents as austere, autocratic, and committed to amateurism, dramatizes his belief that the Olympics declined when authority, amateur ideals, and moral gatekeeping gave way to lawyers, endorsements, and “rights.”

All this made me yearn for the good old days, the many decades when Avery Brundage, a crusty Old Rightist, ruled the Olympics with an iron hand.

The closing section complicates any simple pro-Kerrigan reading. Rothbard says he was not “aggressively pro-Kerrigan,” criticizing her lack of grace in speech and demeanor, and instead endorses Oksana Bayul’s victory as the proper artistic and athletic resolution of the skating drama. The essay ends by returning from the specific scandal to its institutional thesis: the Olympics need firmer authority and less politicized spectacle.

So the figure-skating soap opera ended fittingly.

Its relevance lies in how compactly it displays Rothbard’s late style: anti-statist, anti-left, anti-therapeutic, moralizing, and combatively cultural. The Olympics become a microcosm of his broader concerns: the intrusion of politics into private life, the replacement of character by victimhood, the weakening of rules by legalism, and the commercialization and bureaucratization of institutions once governed by stricter ideals.