Carl Diem - Career

Career

Born into an upper-middle-class family, Diem was a middle- and long-distance runner as a teenager - unusual in a country where gymnastic-style athletics was fashionable, rather than what were known as "anglo-saxon" athletics. He showed an early gift for organizing, founding his first athletic club, called Marcomannia, in 1899. As a young man, Diem originally pursued a career in sales, but also began to write articles for sporting newspapers. At the age of twenty, he was hired by the German Sports Authority for Athletics (the Deutsche Sportbehörde für Athletik, or DSBfA), and a year later was elected to its board of directors. Diem was an ardent believer in the heroic Olympian ideal, and in the contributions that international sport could make to harmony between nations. In this regard, and many others, he was a fervent disciple of Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the International Olympic Committee and father of the modern international Olympiad. In 1906 Diem began his long Olympic career, leading the German contingent of athletes to the Athens games (for reasons that are not entirely clear, the German delegation actually entered the stadium first in the parade of athletes). In 1909, the games for the summer of 1912 were awarded to Stockholm, but the IOC made it clear that Diem and his fellow organizers could expect to hold the 1916 games in Berlin. In 1912 he initiated the award of the German Sports Badge, following the example of a Swedish award encountered during the Stockholm Olympics.

Diem threw himself into preparations for the 1916 games; his principal partner in this and most of his Olympic endeavors was Theodor Lewald, who would for many years be chairman of the German Olympic Committee. In the summer of 1914, Diem and Lewald were planning their spectacular 1916 Olympiad when World War I erupted; the Berlin games were subsequently cancelled. Diem enlisted in the German army and served in Belgium and France. He was wounded at St. Quentin, recovered, and fought at both Champagne and the Argonne.

After the war, Olympic officials penalized Germany by excluding the country from the 1920 and 1924 games; Diem and Lewald, who had returned to their sports-organizing duties, lobbied successfully to win permission for a German team to compete in the 1928 games in Amsterdam. With support from the state, Diem also founded the Deutsche Hochschule für Leibesübungen, a school dedicated to the study of the science of sport. He was a great admirer of American athletic programs, and in 1929 toured the U.S. for five weeks with Lewald; during this trip he formed a strong friendship with Avery Brundage, an American Olympic official who would play a major role in the controversy over the 1936 Olympics (and in Olympic history for decades to come).