Olympic Fever-Catch It!

Gerald: Oh, it's not going to be easy. My brother and I know. Men have never done synchronized swimming in a sanctioned competition in this country. Officially, it's got like a zero acceptance rate.

Lawrence: I don't swim.

Gerald: Lawrence doesn't swim. So.. I mean, no, of course not.. no one's going to just walk up and hand us a gold medal. Men's syncro isn't even in the '88 Olympics yet.

Lawrence: That's okay, because we could use the time. 'Cause I'm not.. I'm not that strong a swimmer.

Gerald: But I mean, that just means, you know, for '92, we're a lock for the gold.

Harry Shearer and Martin Short, Men's Synchronized Swimming sketch, SNL

I'm sorry this has been so long in coming (that's what she said), but I've been pretty overwhelmed with work and sitting around watching TV, so I've been neglecting the ones and ones of you who visit this site once or twice a year. I'll try to spend more time on the blog in the future.

For now though, its that time again and excitement is palpable. Another Olympic games is on the extremely polluted horizon. This is a special time, when millions of American women and exactly 14 men stop watching Oprah and instead watch the Olympics. You know, the every other year sports extravaganza where athletes no one has ever heard of suddenly become Symbols Of Our Nation and the standard bearers of the American Dream. All in the midst of the other inferior countries who clearly fail to measure up. It used to be every four years but people tended to forget about them in between Olympics, kind of like how the Sopranos’ hiatus used to last five times longer than the actual season. The ratings for this thing remain huge, but hey, America’s Funniest Home Videos gets great ratings too so what does that tell you?

Lets just get this on the table: the Olympics should be crushed into a tiny little box at the salvage yard like Jules’ and Vincent’s car in Pulp Fiction, and dropped into Lake Erie to be eaten slowly by those zebra mussels that are slowly killing the Great Lakes. Bad enough that they squander billions in countries that have far better uses for it than building ice rinks and pelotons, and I can overlook the unabashed corruption and nationalist feeding frenzy it stokes, but people, the Olympics represent the pinnacle in everything that’s wrong with both sports and television. That’s crossover star power that would impress even Bo and Deion. I should say, the amount of fact checking in this post is virtually non-existent. If I think something is true, then it must be true.

The best place to start is with the institution of the Olympics themselves. Other than the Cosa Nostra, never has there been a more untouchable gang of self-aggrandizing thugs than the International Olympic Committee. While they invoke the mantra of some ephemeral Olympic “movement,” the truth is that the IOC just puts on a show every two years. They talk some sucker city or country into paying all the costs while the IOC reaps billions in corporate sponsorships, advertising revenue, broadcast licensing, and the members make out like bandits on out-and-out bribes from the bidders. Few Olympics ever turn a profit for the host, and often it leaves the host country in debt for decades to come. Yet for some reason, cities and countries all over the world fall all over themselves to bribe the IOC selection committees just for the chance. Hell, Denver had to bail out of the 1976 Winter Olympics the costs got so out of control and it took them forever to pay off the costs of not having the Olympics. Athens spent so much money actually building all the required facilities they cannot pay to maintain them after the games. The IOC largely operates in the shadowy world of “international law,” generally beyond any particular country’s legal institutions. Only the individual members’ sense of shame acts to curtail rampant and widespread corruption. To add some vestige of legitimacy, it operates something called the Court of Arbitration for Sports, which has a lot in common with the Soviet show trials.

These people's insufferability is remarkable. They view themselves as some sort of legitimate world institution capable of bringing hostile governments together, healing the sick, ending wars. In short, they think they’re Jesse Jackson. Juan Antonio Samaranch, former Boss of the IOC, used to demand that he be addressed as “His Excellency.” I don’t even think John Gotti had that kind of stroke. In reality, about all they’re capable of is draining the host country of a few billion, leaving a generation of illiterate kids, potholed roads, and festering public works the country can no longer afford to fix. They make billions while our discus throwers have to work at Home Depot. I will say this in defense of the IOC; at least they let the athletes earn money. Hey NCAA, you're not even as fair to your athletes as the IOC. How does that taste?

Then there’s the ridiculous nature of the actual games themselves. Synchronized swimming, really? Ping-pong? Rhythmic gymnastics? Curling? Really, curling? We’re supposed to get all fired up and wave the flag for a cross between shuffleboard on ice and sweeping the back patio? I mean, why not darts or making balloon animals (at least you could combine those sports). Olympic sports have proliferated like college bowl games or cellulite on Britney Spears, and most have just about as much value. Why? To sell more tickets (witness: stampede in Beijing to get tickets) and to increase the hours available to sell to television. With all these games, though, there’s apparently no room for baseball or softball after these Olympics. I’m sure its just a mere coincidence that those are sports in which the United States would do well. What is the IOC inserting in their place? Rugby. You can also now decide to be on whatever team you like. For eligibility to be on a nation’s team, the IOC requires that you be either a citizen or your parents or grandparents had been born in that country. To get around those onerous requirements, a lot of countries have instituted the practice of bestowing instant citizenships on Olympic team members. So there’s now a kind of free agency in the Olympics, like A-Rod trying to figure out who he’ll grace with his presence. And apparently, if you don’t qualify for your national team through the trials, the national committee has the power to just vote you on (Michelle Kwan thinks that's a little odd), which I guess is like being voted off the island but in reverse. This all ensures that only the finest and most qualified athletes go to the games….uh, right.

Once the teams get there, the rampant and flagrant fixing begins. Who can forget the IOC stealing the 1972 basketball gold medal from the US? The bought-off French figure skating judge cheating for the Russians? I guess the Frenchie had to help the Russians since there weren’t any Germans in the competition. Its not necessarily all anti-American. Remember Paul Hamm winning his gold medal due to a “scoring error”? When your “scoring system” makes Cook County voting look on the up and up, its time to question your process. What the outright fixing doesn’t handle, the doping does. The Warsaw Pact countries really perfected this in the ‘70s, sending dozens of biologically ambiguous competitors so whacked out on steroids bookies were taking action on whose head or heart would be the first to explode right in the middle of a competition. Then what worked so well behind the Iron Curtain made it to the West when all their coaches and trainers started defecting. One by one, anyone worth a damn in track and field, and later other sports, started testing positive. You could say at least they were testing, but it took the IOC years to catch up to the problem, and even now scores of athletes fail in every games. How many aren’t caught because they were able to beat the test?

Now lets get to this year specifically. I know its all about how much swag the members can squeeze out of the prospective host country’s bidders, but who thought it would be a good idea to pick China as a location? Were Iraq and Iran too busy? Why not Cuba or the Sudan? Something about being able to take a cab from the Olympic stadium to the site where the army brutally put down democratic protesters has to take a bit of the sheen off the games. This is a country that has brutally repressed Tibet, tried to exterminate the Falun Gong, supports a genocidal regime in the Sudan literally in exchange for oil supplies, has all-encompassing censorship and stifles any modicum of political debate, allows families to have only one child, basically runs slave labor shops (for Nike and Microsoft though, so that makes it ok), and applies the death penalty to relatively low-grade crimes. When Texas says “damn, that’s a lot of executions,” you may want to rethink your corrections policies. Then there’s the air. China promised the skies would be clear so that the world's top athletes (read, "air breathers") wouldn't hack up a lung. The incredible expansion in Chinese economic growth has seen the rampant increase in factories and coal-burning power plants throughout China, which had the predictable environmental impact. (sidebar-the West is completely deluding itself that the Kyoto Treaty is going to have any measurable effect-until China and India do something to control pollution, there’s not much more the West can do that will have a really big impact on world pollution). Having failed miserably to reduce the haze, China has been forced to take emergency crash measures like banning cars, shutting down factories, and seeding the clouds. I guess one bright side to being a Communist dictatorship is you can accomplish these things with a minimum amount of red tape and temporary injunction hearings. On the other hand, the Chinese appetite for control has gone so far as to try to censor the foreign press. Where’s a CCLU when you actually need them? Nothing like holding something as theoretically prestigious as the Olympic Games in a place like that. These games have fueled a spate of nationalism of near Berlin 1936 proportions. The Chinese have sworn to win these Olympics, and are pulling out all stops. From sending children to special “sports academies,” to unprecedented funding and supervision of the programs in each sport, China is building an Olympic colossus. Which is ok, except the point is to prove that China is the greatest nation in the world, and as a means of leveraging itself greater prestige in the developing world. In the next 20 years, it won’t be the US against Europe; it’ll be the West against China. Now, Los Angeles admittedly started this-those Olympics were like a Reagan campaign commercial. But that was just marketing. It didn’t have the Official Government Apparatus behind the planning and execution, or more importantly, behind the athletic development, like this one does.

Finally there’s the coverage. If you want to watch the Olympics just to see the actual games, you’re basically out of luck. Because the TV coverage is the E! True Hollywood Story for every single American participant. First off, they only show sports designed to have maximum appeal to the hugely disproportionate female viewership-gymnastics, some track and field, swimming and diving, and softball. If you want to watch boxing, basketball, or weightlifting, you’ll have to find a way to catch CBC on satellite. And there’s a strict 3: 1 ratio of “up close and personal” profile minutes to actually showing these people competing in the sport. If you’re interested in the great majority of the athletes who happen not to be on Team USA, you are also out of luck (or consigned to CBC) because NBC simply does not show the rest of the world. The whole point of the games for NBC is just a backdrop to sell the US athletes' personalities. These people mostly are so obscure they couldn’t get arrested. Yet they’re all competing for the Gold, and by that I mean, Advertising Gold. Whoever can generate enough positive publicity that they capture America’s Heart will generate millions in advertising dollars. So its a heavy dose of "Jenny couldn't blink until she was 12" stories, with little time for the actual sport itself. Now, that’s what the Olympic Movement is really all about. Signed Bruce Jenner still on television 30 years later.

There is one thing I do really like about the Olympics though. That’s the now customary “can they get everything ready in time” countdown that has preceded the last few games. Seems like its now inevitable that the host country hasn’t allowed enough time to prepare for the Olympics, and they wind up building their stadiums like 20 minutes before the Opening Ceremonies. From Atlanta that can’t get its mass transit system ready, to Athens that literally didn’t have the facilities ready until the games started, to Beijing trying to reduce the toxic air, the best race is the one these host countries fight against bankruptcy to see whether they can actually stage the games on time. London doesn’t host the games until 2012 and its already starting to experience problems. So my interest will be in seeing whether the things fall apart before they ever get started.

The rest of you should have fun though.