The limits of Pan-Americanism: The case of the failed 1942 Pan-American Games

Although there had been suggestions to organise Pan-American Games as early as the 1910s, it was during the 1930s that such an event became a certain possibility. The cancellation of the 1940 Olympics due to the Second World War prompted sport officials in different countries of the Americas to vie for the organisation of a hemispheric festival to compensate for the temporal loss of the Olympic gathering. This article studies the failed attempt to organise Pan-American Games in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1942. In doing so, it situates the efforts of Argentine sport leaders within the structure of international sport, the rhetoric of Pan-Americanism and the complex dynamics of US-Argentine relations. The story of the failed 1942 Pan-American Games embodies and represents the limits of Pan-Americanism in the 1940s. It also reveals that these limits would be redefined, in an ironic way, in 1951, when Pan-Americanism through sport was finally made possible at the inaugural Pan-American Games held in Buenos Aires.