Story link: https://chapelboro.com/town-square/unc-professor-takes-olympics-history-class-across-the-pond
At UNC, I’ve picked up what some casually call the “Matt Andrews minor” — a history minor built almost entirely from Professor Matt Andrews’ legendary sports history courses. He teaches four large lecture courses every year, and I have taken three of them: The Olympic Games: A Global History in the fall of my sophomore year, Race, Basketball, and the American Dream in junior spring, and now, in my final semester, Baseball and American History.
My favorite part about these classes is studying how sports are never truly apolitical, no matter how hard institutions try to pretend otherwise. His courses have taught me to look at American and global history through the lens of sports— how these games can reveal values and mirror conflicts.
During my junior spring, Professor Andrews announced he would be taking a group of students to London and Paris for a two-week study-abroad trip during the 2024 Olympics. Many of us on the journalism trip also happened to be members of the “Matt Andrews Minor” club, so we jumped at the chance to interview him and his students in Paris.
We set up an interview with the group and met in an alleyway one of my peers had found which had a perfect Eiffel Tower backdrop with little tourist traffic. The students had just attended a men’s indoor volleyball game the night before between Italy and Poland. One student described the atmosphere as “better atmosphere than the Duke-Carolina basketball game.”
While that is quite the claim, I was more intrigued by Andrews’ take on the 2024 games. Professor Andrews is a tough critic of the Olympics in his classes and the idea of Olympism– that national unity can be achieved through sporting competition.
But, after witnessing the games for the first time since Los Angeles 1984, Andrews had a different opinion.
“I kind of put on the hat of the critic of the IOC and the Olympic Games: too big, too expensive, too nationalistic, provokes tension rather than relieves tension. This has really opened my eyes to what a wonderful event the Olympic Games are. We were in the volleyball game yesterday with Italians and Poles, who were hugging each other, and singing, and dancing, and it just seems to bring everyone together.”
It was surreal to witness my professor, the same one who taught me to question the systems behind sports, celebrate the Olympics as a unifying force. It was a full-circle moment: learning history in class, witnessing it abroad, and seeing how sport can sometimes transcend politics. I wrote an article and made a radio package and sent it in to WCHL & Chapelboro. Check it out!