1931: Workers’ Olympiads in Vienna

From July 19 to 26, 1931 the second Workers’ Olympiads of the Socialist Workers Sport International (SASI) took place in Vienna. Athletes from 18 countries took part in the competitions and performances in disciplines such as athletics, football, defence sports or chess. With the subsequent Fourth International Socialist Congress, the event was a culmination of Red Vienna’s self-representation. The Workers' Olympiads combined collective features of sports and celebration, among others, a mass festival production with 4,000 participants at Vienna’s Prater Stadium, which told the heroic story of the proletariat (director: Stefan Hock). The modernist stadium designed by architect Otto Ernst Schweizer, which was completed shortly before the games, became a trend-setting standard for other new stadiums on the continent.

Workers’ sport represented a pedagogical counter-model to bourgeois or capitalist organised sport. The injury and limitation of the working class due to poor living and working conditions was to be countered by individual physical development and the collective formation of a self-confident movement.