Five Gold Rings

In which our Hero gets a few things off his Gold-Medal-free chest

Now that I don’t feel oversaturated by the event itself, let me tell you why I hate the Olympics, and I say that reflective of a deeply personal standard that I don’t even hold myself to: The money strangles the majesty.

So first, let me explain the standard thing. In a perfect world, I’d “boycott” the Olympics. Never watch, never support. And yet, if you take out the attempt to milk the money cow till the udder’s come off in hand, it becomes a humanist triumph and I’m wired for that. And sure I don’t tend to watch them, but the opening and closing ceremonies are beautiful and symbolic and clever workings of national identity and cultural history, and the idea itself consists of beautiful statements that move me.

Take the flame. The flame is lit in a solar lamp at a temple in Greece and carried with honour to the hosting city. The continuity of that is magnificent. A better more perfect eternal flame than any other could be, a fire drawn from a sky full of the same light that has touched pretty much every single human being from the present all the way back to Adam or Clyde. It’s poetry.

Take the fundamental concept of people trying to excel, trying to be the very very best in all the world and achieve for just one moment a perfection that rivals all the rest of the world. Pushing the very bounds of what human capacity is understood to be. It’s amazing. Take a look at an infographic from the New York Times that plots the times of every medal winning 100 meter sprinter since 1896. At the moment that Usain Bolt crossed the finish line, his equivalent from 1896, the fastest man in the world at that time, would have made it just 80% of the way down the field. (And in case you think it’s just the drugs, check out where they compare the championship times for kids)

I love that drive, I love the kids who train so hard to do this, I love their spirit and that we can celebrate them. And then things get twisty.

Here’s my first objection, and this one is actually a bit of a semantic thing, so bear with me. It may also be highly personal, but I think that Olympic achievement is about measurable results. Which has two implications. The first is that as beautiful as they can be, events that require a judge to make an aesthetic decision are not legitimate for the Olympics. I don’t mind having a different championship event, I don’t mind it being international, but prettiest dive does not resonate with me the way fastest cyclist does. Longest, farthest, strongest, highest, these are the superlatives that should apply, in my mind. Even events like fencing are potentially problematic, because they rely on judges, but fencing is judging the contact, and not the style. Whereas figure skaters and synchronized swimmers are athletes who are also measured for “artistic merit.” To me art is good, but not Olympic.

The next implication of making the events about measurability is that team sports and games are not Olympic. The best team implies the collection of best individuals, but… not really. Not exactly. It matters as much how you game the game. There was “scandal” when the 2012 badminton players were discovered to be throwing games to try to create the playoff ladder they preferred. But that’s pretty much the problem. If it has to be handled in ladders than very clearly the arrangement of the ladder will inevitably benefit someone more than another.

My second objection is problematic because I don’t have an answer to the question. Nonetheless, I think that permitting professionals to participate in the Olympics changes the nature of the event. My rule about teams would eliminate a lot of the major issues anyway, but an NBA player is to an amateur basketball player as an F1 race car is to a Honda. Amateur players don’t have team doctors on standby. Professional players are in a different sport, and it’s silly to allow the two to mix. It’s an ironic objection because most team sports also have fairly well structured rules that make them fairly measured. And honestly, the games tend to be fun and we want the best players in the game. But… it ain’t Olympics.

My third objection moves out of the actual execution of the Olympics to the street-bully mentality of the organization around it. I’m not even going to touch the corruption aspects of the city selection process, and I’m also not much interested in the incomprehensible lack of economic evidence supporting the justifications for *ever* hosting this kind of event. What I’m talking about is the fact that the Olympics bring with them their own kind of purchased legality that you don’t usually see outside of dystopian science fiction (or westerns). Because the Olympics are coming to down, basically everybody in the occupied territory is now under commercially mandated martial law. Thou shalt not sell a competing product to a sponsor. Thou shalt not use a competing product, even as an athlete, and we’re talking trivia like condoms, not performance enhancers like high tech swimsuits. London had a kerfuffle about people selling french fries which would conflict with corporate high lord McDonald’s interests in locking down the starchstick market.

But most of all, of all the sins that gall me about this mass, it infuriates me that they’ve blocked athletes like Eddie the Eagle. I’ve listed him as a hero of mine before, an Olympic ski jumper from England as I recall, with about as much talent for ski jumping as… I dunno, a brick? He was not good. But he was Olympian and glowed with that same light and was reachable. He was the ultimate underdog, and a hero to those of us for whom athletics was another word for antimatter. He was human, proudly, magnificently, standing on that stage, not to win but to try. But the IOC was concerned for the “dignity” of the event. So now there’s a qualification requirement that basically eliminates the outliers, eliminates the non-conformists, eliminates the stories. Michael Phelps is a magnificent machine, tuned and trained to perfection at a task. He is very near to those Olympian gods. Eddie was a man, very near to us.

I watched one of the bicycle races during the London games. 8 laps around a track. I thought it’d be exciting. But instead they fell into a column behind a “pace” cycle. Okay, I thought, maybe that’s just a way to let them settle out before the race starts, I’ve seen pace cars in car races and they fade as the race begins. But no, the lap times are being updated, and they’re all just sedately lined up, pedaling after the pace bike. Two laps. Three laps. Four. Five. On the sixth lap, the pace bike faded, and suddenly like attack dogs, the cyclists were unleashed, throwing themselves forward, and competing.

It was magnificent. But what then was the point of the other 5 laps? There was no race at all till the end. And to me these are the modern Olympics. Artificial, staged, and cold to the touch, like the statues of the Gods from high Mons Olympus.

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