The Popular Front and the Barcelona 1936 Popular Olympics

This book examines the **Barcelona 1936 Popular Olympics**—an alternative, anti-fascist games planned in opposition to the Berlin Olympics—as a lens onto the politics and culture of the Popular Front in Spain and beyond.

James Stout explores how worker and left-wing sporting movements, trade unions, and Popular Front governments came together to use sport as a tool of internationalism and anti-fascist solidarity, and how the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War cut short the event just as athletes from across the world arrived in Barcelona.

By situating the Popular Olympics within interwar worker sport networks and the shift in Communist and socialist strategy toward Popular Front alliances, the book shows how playing "as if the world was watching" became an act of political resistance and a precursor to the global mobilization of volunteers in Spain.