Pull the plug on the Olympics
Posted: Wednesday March 10, 1999 01:09 PM
As we approach next week's special meeting of the International Olympic
Committee, apologists for the IOC have begun to try and divert attention from
the massive Olympic scandal by chanting that it really doesn't matter all that
much. No, we are told: the rot in the Olympic administration will certainly
have no effect on the Olympic
athletes.
This is, of course, patent nonsense. When the foundation of a house is on fire,
the lodgers upstairs are very much in danger. The fact is that, even before the
corruption of the IOC came to light, the Games themselves were already looking a
bit dinosauric. They are inessential at worst, redundant at best. Yes,
ironically, while the Olympics may be the largest single regularly scheduled
activity in the world, they also may be the most unnecessary.
We really need a World Series to determine the champion of baseball. We need a
World Cup to resolve soccer supremacy. But the Olympics are superfluous. If
they ceased to exist tomorrow, the track and field federation could still run
its own championships, as could figure skating, basketball and skiing. Moreover,
putting fencing, three-day eventing, Greco-Roman wrestling and field hockey
under the same tent really serves no useful purpose. Does it?
Not anymore.
Oh, sure, when the Olympics were revived more than a century ago, this kind of
global athletic convocation might have made sense. Today, though, with jet
planes and television, it seems downright senseless for cities to pay to build
huge facilities for a single vulgar hoedown that's over in a fortnight.
The fact is, too, that Juan Antonio Samaranch and his hypocritical cronies have
sowed the seeds of their own destruction by trying to make the Games into
something that they most certainly are not. They are not some religious service,
nor a communion of brotherhood.
This Saturday, when Don King introduces us to Evander Holyfield and Lennox Lewis
in the prize ring, Mr. King is forthrightly giving us a fight for the
heavyweight championship of the world. No sappy prayers. No doves released at
mid-ring. A competition. That's all. And hooray for
that.
But Samaranch and company have postured, claiming the Games were something more,
something much purer, more spiritual. That means that the duplicity of the
holier-than-thou IOC has harmed its vaunted Games far more than Don King ever
has harmed boxing. Don King has never claimed that boxing is a
"movement."
In fact, as important as the Olympics are to the competitors, the Games are,
already, relatively lacking in passion. To be at, say, a World Cup is to sense
an incredible electricity. The IOC, though, has chosen to make the Games into a
festival, a trade show, a quasi-worship service. So much of the power of caring,
of cheering, of rooting -- of just being a sports fan -- has been distilled from
the Olympics. They've been diluted, spread too wide -- and but an inch deep.
Now we find out that the people sitting at the altar are all humbug. You bet
the Olympic Games have been hurt. You bet the Olympic athletes have been put at
risk. And don't let the IOC members tell you any differently next week when they
gather together in
Lausanne.
When the Sydney Games open next year, it will mean that the Olympics have
managed to appear in their fourth millennium. What other world institution can
boast that? I can only think of Judaism. Anyway, it's certainly rare, and
anything must be very precious to have survived for so long. The stewards of the
Olympics have not just been naughty rascals. They have, for the first time in
this third millennium, made us seriously think: Let The Games
End.
These commentaries, which appear each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, are posted weekly by CNN/SI.
|
