a worm's eye view of the olympics

In my not-so-humble opinion, the Olympics is dead. Sure, every four years a bunch of athletes gather in a frantically-renovated city and the world is treated to an ever-more-spectacular extravaganza, but these are not the Olympic Games of even my relatively recent youth. Those, as I say, are dead. And the sad thing is that, having survived geopolitical turmoil, drug scandals, incompetent committees and nationalist tensions, it took just two words to kill them: "sponsors' rights".

Now this is not a new opinion (I have felt so ever since the athletes were forbidden to publish their diaries lest someone's "sole broadcacsting rights" be infringed upon, and nothing since has contradicted that), nor is it an isolated one - indeed, the 1996 Atlanta Olympics is widely held to be a turning point in the blatant commercialisation of the Games. Nor, at this point do I particularly care - I was never that keenly interested in the games themselves, and whatever sadness I might have felt for the passing of an institution has long since faded to a mild sense of regret. What I do want to write about is a phenomenon I have only noticed this time around - people¹ who defend the Olympics from this sort of criticism not because it is undeserved, but because slamming the games is "a slap in the face of the athletes who have worked all their lives to get there". No, seriously.

For one, this is sadly symptomatic of society's tendency to idolise athletes - it's a hard life, sure, but so are lots of other, less glamorous occupations, and no one speaks of a slap in the face of all the fast food workers when McDonalds is criticised - but that's a rant for another day. The question I do bite back is - why do they think the athletes even care?

Personally, while I am neither an athlete nor a sports fan, I am involved in a subculture with similar issues - the world of competitive scrabble. Now, first of all, let me hasten to add that the tournaments I have attended have had very generous and light-handed sponsors, and I am not trying to draw any parallels between the actual situations involved. What I am getting at is this: you gather a bunch of scrabble players in a room for a tournament, and there is only one thing they care about - playing each other. The audience, the press, the opinions of the rest of the world, don't really matter. And I'm willing to bet that by the time an athlete gets to the Olympics, he couldn't care less about the Olympic committee, the host city, the sponsors, the trappings, or even the audience. What matters is competing against the other athletes - indeed, lacking that mindset and psychological reward system, I find it hard to believe that anyone would keep at it long enough to get to the Olympics in the first place.

So, perhaps the Olympics isn't really dead after all - it has just split up into two different Olympics. In one, a bunch of athletes have the pleasure of seeing someone else spend a lot of money and give them a place and time to compete against each other. In the other, a bunch of corporations broadcast a televised spectacle to millions of people worldwide, and count it advertising money well spent. And these two Olympics lead a happy commensal existence - I am tempted to call them mutually parasitic, but that's just my personal distaste talking - and all is indeed well.

What's that you say? The "Olympic Spirit"? Ah, now that, I'm afraid, really is dead, and I see little chance of it reviving. From all indications, it will not be missed.


[1] this might well be an American thing [back]