Olympic Spirit?

I enjoy watching the games at the Olympics. Many of the sports and contests are interesting and exciting, and the levels of skill displayed are often admirable or even amazing.  It is a lot of fun.

However I find the hypocritical posturing about the “Olympic spirit and traditions” more than a little hard to take. The games began, quite snootily, not as competitions among  the world’s best athletes, but rather as a playground for well to do Europeans who had never sullied themselves by earning money with their skills.  People from modest backgrounds who needed to earn livings and had used their athletic skills to do so were explicitly excluded. Jim Thorpe, perhaps the most famous of the early Olympic athletes, was stripped of his Olympic medals after it was discovered that he had once or twice turned a few bucks playing semipro baseball.

Nationalism and even jingoism were present in the games from the first.  By 1936, when the Nazis put on their  massive spectacle at the Olympics in Berlin, they were dominant. The Nazis and  later the Soviets and their colonies used the games and their successes in the games  as tools and sources for propaganda and assertions of superiority for their systems. From time to time officials of the Olympic committees claim to regret the excessive nationalism in the games, but  their statements ring about as true as NCAA officials’ bleating about “student athletes”. After all, as various people have asked, if they don’t want nationalism, why do they have national teams and uniforms?

Then there are the obvious bad sportsmanship, hypocrisy,  and out and out cheating that have been so much of the history of the games, the most glaring  being the forty year absurdity of clinging to an “amateurs only” rule while welcoming Soviet bloc athletes who were obviously careerists paid to compete. Right behind might be the systematic ignoring of cheating and doping by those same Soviet bloc teams, with cases of  everything from rigging judging  to changing outcomes of games to (probably) passing men or hermaphrodites off as women.

This year we have seen examples of vulgar political correctness in the organization and management of the games.   Some poor athlete from Greece was sent home for cracking a silly joke about Africans and mosquitoes, while the sanctimonious IOC could not spare a moment for  remembrance of Israeli athletes murdered at the games of 1972, one presumes out of fear of offending Islamic nations and anti-Semites everywhere.  It’s hard to see much in the way of admirable ideals there. So I’ll enjoy the games while realizing that those organizing and running  them are and have been no cleaner or more idealistic  than the people running Penn State  football or professional wrestling.  Indeed the IOC can sometimes make the WWE look pretty good by comparison.