IS THIS TRIP NECESSARY?

 

               The world today is quite different than it was in 1896, when the Olympic Games were revived after a 1,500-year pause. People got around mostly by ship or horse then, and although the light bulb had been invented a few years before most areas were lighted only by fire.

               International sports were all but nonexistent, with only the yachting America’s Cup operating on a regular schedule. Sports are a function of leisure, which in turn is tied to wealth, and what competitions there were were rich men’s provinces. Thus, when a group of European aristocrats thought that reconvening the O Games in the name of world amity was a nifty idea, they had in mind an upper-class picnic with nary a proletarian tinge.

Indeed, even training for a sport was deemed de classe then, and remained so for some time. If you saw the wonderful movie “Chariots of Fire,” about Brits training for the 1924 Stockholm Olympics, you’ll recall that Harold Abraham, the eventual 100-meter dash winner, was criticized for having a coach, Sam Mussabini, and that Mussabini had to hear about his pupil’s victory second hand because he was barred from the Olympic stadium, as were all other coaches.

The 1896 Games in Athens were attended by 241 athletes from 14 nations. Most of the contestants were Greek and most of the rest were from the U.S., Germany or Great Britain. All were male, women’s sports barely existing then. Women’s events were added at the 1900 Paris Games, but only 22 women joined the 900-plus contestants for that one. The Winter Games debuted in France in 1924 with a cast of just 258.

From such modest beginnings the Olympics have turned into its present mega size, with athlete casts of thousands (11,000 at Tokyo last year) and budgets in the zillions. Its original function of promoting good will among nations has been forgotten, its playing fields turned into proxies for whatever national rivalries happen to be perking. Far from being the “youth festival” its leaders describe, it’s contested mostly by hardened pros in their late 20s or 30s. Cheating always is a subplot, with Russia regarding its host status at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi as a license to dope its athletes on a grand scale. The International Olympic Committee’s lack of enthusiasm for enforcing penalties that may dim its show encourages such depredations.

The notion that politics have no place in sports is a running gag line. Countries have vied to host the Games because they provide a blank page for promoting anything from tourism to ideology before a world audience.  Nazi Germany hosted the 1936 Summer Games and Imperial Japan was scheduled to host the 1940 Winter Games before war intervened.  Russia and China have gotten a number of IOC recent-year nods, the Soviet Union hosting the 1980 summer event, Putin’s Russia Sochi ‘14, Beijing the 2004 summers and this year’s winter event. IOC honchos like it that no pesty citizens’ groups can question Olympic preparations in those places. Pervasive official secrecy helps the graft flow smoothly and the authorities can ensure a tame public at game time.

China being what it is, next month’s Games already are shrouded in political turmoil; no less could be expected given China’s crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong and its mass imprisonment of its Muslim minorities. The U.S. and a few other nations are sending athletes but, in protest, not government officials.  Some protest, huh? 

On top of that is the covid epidemic that’s raging again worldwide. Some athletes, most notably players in the NHL, aren’t competing in Beijing because of covid considerations, especially the threat of long quarantines should cases emerge while the Games are in progress. How authorities will react if (when) that occurs remains to be seen, but substantial schedule changes could be involved. Like at Tokyo last year, foreign attendance will be banned, and there will be limits on local participation. In an especially goofy pronouncement the Chinese government said that spectators can applaud but not cheer or otherwise respond vocally.  It will be interesting to see how that will be enforced.

International gatherings of any kind were rare around the time the Olympics resumed, so a case could be made for using sports to get various nationalities together on peaceable ground. No more. Two U.S. major leagues, the National Basketball Association and the NHL, are a sort of ongoing Olympics in terms of participation; when their current seasons began the NBA had 109 “international” players from 39 countries on its rosters and the NHL had more than 200 from places other than Canada and the U.S.

 Every major ski meet has a United Nations feel, as do most tennis and many major golf events.  Even the American national pastime of baseball has an international glow, with about a third of Major League players coming from other lands.  Every sport on the Olympic roster has an annual or biannual world championship that can be viewed internationally on television, meaning that even in obscure sports athletes can test themselves against the best of their peers more often than every four years.

The “Is this trip necessary?” issue is coming up increasingly within Olympic ranks. The huge cost of staging the Games, and the attendant disputes and disruptions, has pared the number of countries wishing to host them, to the point where only two (China and Kazakhstan) put in bids for the current edition.

I covered three Winter Os-- at Calgary (1988), Albertville (’92) and Lillehammer (’94)-- but like most Americans have no great affinity for winter sports. The winter schedule is thin and full of odd and stylized sports, such as two-against-the-clock long-course speed skating, the biathlon combination of shooting and cross-country skiing (see the Russo-Finnish War of 1940), and bobsled racing, whose entry fee is a $50,000 vehicle. It’s a pretty good show, but just one among many and, by me, not worth the trouble. Ditto for the Summer Games.