Nicholas
Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to
literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree
or disagree with him.
WHAT’S THE POINT OF THE OLYMPICS?
Believe me, I do
not like launching into yet another think-piece criticising the
sports–worshipping mentality. On this blog I have already talked about the
foolish jingoistic nationalism that enters into any international sports
competitions, the ill will they often generate, and the delusion that
competitive sports somehow make for a more fit country. (See my earlier posts Not My Religion and Hans Off and Other Nonsense.)
But the Rio
Olympics force me to revisit some of these issues. Here’s an expensive
international competition staged in a city wracked with poverty. Huge
facilities siphon money away from necessary social programmes and the
slum-dwellers quite rightly ask why they should be burdened with even more debt
and why their lives should be ignored for the sake of what is in effect a huge
Potemkin village.
I ask some
overwhelming questions too: What is the purpose of the Olympics anyway? And is
there any way they can be made into something honest?
From 1896, when
the modern Olympics were devised, their propagandists have told us that they
are a festival of international peace and cooperation. The best athletes in the
world get together to show off their skills in an atmosphere of mutual
goodwill. This has, of course, always been a lie. From the very beginning, the
modern Olympics have been pre-eminently displays of national chauvinism. The
example of the Berlin Olympics hosted in Nazi Germany in 1936 used to be cited
as an aberration. A dictator was hijacking the Olympics to make nationalist
(and racist) propaganda. But nationalist display is the essence of the modern
Olympics and 1936 was no aberration. All that parading of flags and tallying of
medals. All that jockeying to become host city. The boycotts, as when the West
boycotted the Olympics after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and African
countries boycotted the Olympics after New Zealand insisted on playing a
minority tribal sport with old South Africa. The obscenity of the defunct
little statelet of Communist East Germany ramping up its medal count by drugging
its athletes up to the eyeballs and filling women with testosterone. The Soviet
(and continuing Russian) pretence that their athletes are “sports students”
when they are to all intents and purposes state-funded full-time professional
athletes. (Speaking of which, the old concept of “amateur” status has long
since gone by the board everywhere.)
International
goodwill is not promoted by the Olympics. It is regularly undermined.
Further to old
East Germany’s pharmaceutical victories, it has been national chauvinism more
than anything else, which has regularly fuelled drug cheating. “It is not the winning, but the taking part”
???? Bollocks. For nationalist purposes, winning rather than good sportsmanship
is the prime goal, and winning means the systematic poisoning of athletes. Once
there was an age of relative innocence, when the great public assumed that
medical assistance given to competing athletes was simply humanitarian. But
much of the pharmacopoeia presented to runners and jumpers and discus-throwers
before the Second World War consisted of drugs that would now be regarded as
illegal. Jack Lovelock was injected in the knee with a “pain-killer” before his
winning 1936 dash. The injection administered would now probably count as
drug-cheating.
To give you some
context. New Zealand’s Valerie Adams (formerly Valerie Vili) has an impeccable
record as an honest, drug-free athlete who has played by the rules. In the
women’s shot put she has been twice an Olympic gold medallist (and since Rio a
silver medallist as well). Once she was temporarily deprived of a gold medal
when it was first awarded to a woman who was later proven to be a drug cheat. But
it has been shown that the best-ever distance thrown by Valerie Adams (21.24
metres) wouldn’t even place her in the top twenty compared with (Russian,
Chinese and East German) women shot-putters in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s.
The reality was that gold medals were routinely won by then-undetected chemical
substances.
I had assumed
that the more efficient detection of illegal drugs would gradually eliminate
this sort of imposture – but a biologist informs me that the next big thing
will not be drug-cheating but gene therapy. Gene-splicing will enable doctors
to create unbeatable athletes from the cradle (or the womb, or conception), so
that the notion of “the best” competing will again be determined by things
other than what happens in training.
To this I add
the obvious fact that Olympic-level sports do not promote healthy lives. “Flo
Jo” (Florence Joyner), America’s four-time gold medallist at the 1988 and 1989
Olympics, was touted as the fastest woman in the world and a role-model for
young athletes. She was dead at the age of 39. Illegal use of drugs to enhance
performance was suspected but never proven. At the very least, speaking as an
overweight, un-athletic 64-year-old, I can say that her sports career did not
make her life longer or healthier.
I have ticked
off national chauvinism, drug-cheating, bad sportsmanship, competitiveness and
the promotion of unhealthiness as the routine blights of the Olympics movement.
Add to this the relatively recent addition of the crass showbiz razzmatazz that
is now the Olympics opening ceremony; and the way that any city foolish enough
to host the Olympics is certain to face a huge and unrecoverable bill. As a
cultural phenomenon, the Olympics now have very little to offer the world.
So what is to be
done?
My suggestions
are radical ones.
(A.) Finally
decide on three or four cities in the world which will, in turn, ALWAYS host
the Olympics, with necessary facilities and accommodation for visitors paid for
by international levy so as not to burden these host cities with unsustainable
debt. That will put an end to the bidding for host status and all the
international ill will that goes with it.
(B.) Remove all
flags, national uniforms and national insignia. Individual athletes
(track-and-field etc.) will compete in plain numbered uniforms. Obviously team
sports will require team uniforms, but these will not be national ones. They
will be a range of standard Olympic uniforms. [“But how will teams be picked if not on a national basis?” you ask.
Fair question – the aim here is to turn down national feeling. Utterly
abolishing it may be impossible.]
(C.) When
athletes win, there will be no acknowledgement of their nationality. They will
be honoured as the individual athletes they are. Nationality will presumably
have to be acknowledged for teams, but there will be no tally of medals won by
different nations. Media outlets that make up such lists will be permanently
banned from the games. Of course such tallies with inevitably be made by
someone – but as I said, the aim is to turn down national feeling, not
accomplish the impossible.
(D.) All
athletes without exception (i.e. including members of teams) will be tested for
illegal drugs, by an international panel, every day for two weeks before the
games begin; and again immediately after any event in which they are placed
first, second or third. This will mean that no placings will be announced until
after the results have been published of such post-event testing. With the new threat
of gene-tampering, all athletes with have to provide authenticated
certification of all medical procedures they have undergone.
(E.) Among other
things, this will mean ending the podium ceremony (invented only in the 1932
Los Angeles Olympics) where too often people are awarded medals they have not deserved.
(F.) And
finally, abolish the irrelevant opening ceremony. It has nothing to do with
sportsmanship. The focus of the games with be on athletic and sporting
achievement; not on showbiz.
Of course it is
highly unlikely that any of my proposals come to pass. But until they (or
something very like them) are implemented, the Olympics will continue to be the
tacky, chauvinistic, expensive, dishonest breeders of international ill will
that they currently are.
I agree that the Olympics is an embarrassing display of nationalism, and despite the apparently fair and equal international flavour, it is quite obviously political - the bias being in favour of the West. The attempted blanket ban on Russian athletes by the IOC was an obvious attempt to humiliate the evil empire. Otherwise, as you suggest, why wasn't every competitor simply drug-tested, irrespective of their country of origin?
ReplyDeleteI watched many of the games from the US, which was a stern test of tolerance for having to endure the arrogant trumpeting of US participants. That American swimmers were going to 'blow every other country out of the water' was nauseating. Gone is the simple celebration of physical prowess, no matter what the country, especially in a sport as aesthetically magnificent as gymnastics.
As should be the case with big money-spinners like the FIFA world cup, where South African communities gained no benefit whatsoever, where was the resultant funding of social programmes for disadvantaged Brazilians?
Most important of all, since this is a literary blogsite, the other irksome by-product of the games was the creation of some dubious verbs: 'she medalled in the rowing.' 'Do you think he's going to podium?'