Olympic Folly

I thought this was a really good article from  http://www.thecutmedia.com

I grew up in a suburb of Chicago that was called at one time the Speed Skating Capital of the World.  And between 1968 and 1980, we churned out Olympic contenders like Kansas churns out Republicans.  I remember watching these silent, emotionless speed skaters circle the rinks for hours, crouched over, one arm behind their back, sacrificing so much simply for the chance to compete.  There was a purity about this heroic commitment that no political figure, rock star or movie star could touch.   Childhood idealism maybe, but these skaters were the most visible measure of the human spirit this young mind could gauge at the time.  And despite my neighborhood access to the odd Olympian, the humbling truth was you could only have your Olympic moment every four years. This made these extraordinary sporting creatures all the more inaccessible, mysterious and epic to me.

And it wasn't just my home town athletes that could make my heart swell. I'll never forget the '76 Japanese men's gymnastic team neck and neck with the Soviets. Shun Fujimoto, unable to take any medication for a shattered kneecap and in excruciating pain, went on to perfectly execute an eight ft high, triple somersault dismount from the rings before collapsing in agony, but triumphed with a gold medal for his team. For most Americans of my generation, our penultimate Olympic moment was the rag tag underdog 1980 US hockey team who beat the Soviets then Sweden to win the gold.  That's what the Olympics was about, it was about amateur athletes, blind courage and out-of-nowhere triumph.

Around 1980 at the height of our Cold War delusions, our whining about state-sponsored Russian teams went from quiet murmurs to full blown Olympic angst.  American athletes bore the entire cost of their training, so it was deemed unfair that US amateurs had to compete against essentially state-sponsored professionals.  A legitimate gripe, but didn't it make our winning moments, which were more often than not at the time, all the more fulfilling?  Wasn't it enough that all this Soviet state-sponsored training often couldn't defeat the Olympic dreams of the kid next door?

It wasn't really until 1984 when Olympic Uber Pimp Peter Ubberoth (who grew up just around the corner from me) turned the LA Olympics into a commercial event awash with so much blond hair and double D bra-size spectator close ups that you could be forgiven if you don't remember a single athlete (Greg Louganis).  LA made US$250MM off the deal, but it didn't give us more success, better athletes or per capita more medals (look to obscure African nations for that).  Anyway, why should that matter, as one Olympic mover and shaker once told me, "as long as our sponsors are satisfied with their investment" in this entertainment extravaganza.

It's not that the athletes are any less extraordinary, it's that they got lost among the business of the Olympics, a business that has become so adulterated on so many levels that Jerry McGuire wouldn't believe its current incarnation.  That squeaky clean Mormon-ic Utah would get caught up in a IOC sex, bribes and favors scandal is almost laughable.  It's so, well, British if you will.  And it is rumored that's exactly how London got the 2012 games.

Then we are shocked and surprised that China has not "kept its promises about smog-control, spying, media access and democracy".  Well, Boo Hoo.  They've simply taken a page out of our Collective Book of BS and learned that for a price the IOC will sellout to just about anyone.  And given that my country was one of the forefathers in bastardizing the Olympics, how dare we be so smug about any country?  After all, if corporate sponsors and steroids weren't propping up our athletes the way that the Chinese government is propping up the US dollar, we'd get lapped by "poorer" Africans (and Zimbabwe would probably have a stronger currency).

While sponsorship and commercial endorsements were genius business moves in their time, and they help amateur athletes with training costs, what seems to have been sacrificed forever is against-all-odds amateur athletic exceptionalism. The Olympics have become a folly of doping, professional athletes and endorsement deals, all made possible by an ethically-challenged IOC and a collusive democracy destroying corporate media.  As for the corporate sponsors, let's just say that if Visa spent as much time assisting Interpol in tracking down all the child porn publishers who accept Visa as they do in preparing for the Olympics, we might be living in a very different world indeed.