Humor aside, there have been some non-sporting headlines hovering about the games in Sochi like so much cigar smoke. Sochi itself, or its preparedness (or lack thereof) for the event, was making headlines before the games even started. The whole business of ridiculous sums of money to build an Olympics apparatus out of nothing and for nothing (after the games are gone) would be worth a blog entry to be sure. (As a reminder, the stadium fiasco in Atlanta reminds us that Turner Field, the apparently untenable home of the Braves, was Olympic Stadium before it was Turner Field.)
The source of some of the earliest headlines in Sochi
The decision to hold an Olympic games in a dictatorship in all but name could have been a subject of discussion, as well as the passing of a noxious set of laws enshrining anti-gay bigotry as law there (Russia was Arizona before Arizona was, I guess) with the Olympic movement seeming to neither notice nor care. I think, though, the easiest way to address the general ethical smelliness of the modern Olympics might be found in another story, circulating in the last few days, that encapsulates the flawed thinking that lies at the root of all of the above. And it's not a new thing; in fact, it has been inscribed on the Olympic movement from its very beginnings -- the "original sin" of the Olympic movement, you might say.
As you are hopefully aware, Ukraine has been in turmoil for several weeks, with the past week-plus bringing the tension to a head in violent clashes between protesters and the government of Viktor Yanukovych. As of yesterday, Yanukovych seems to be out of power with elections for a replacement set for May; of course, Yanukovych sees things differently. In the meantime, the gag-worthy opulence of Yanukovych's palace has been exposed for all the public to see, a former prime minister and principal opponent of Yanukovych is now out of jail and all set to go for his old office, and the situation is rife with uncertainty.
In the midst of all this, International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach gave an interview in which he decided that the high moment of the games was a gold medal by the women's biathlon relay event by the team representing Ukraine. Bach went on to say that the important thing was that the Ukrainian athletes stayed in Sochi to compete in the games despite the unrest in Kyiv. (One athlete, a skier, did withdraw from the games, although she and her coach remained in Russia.)
I don't know about you, but I nearly threw up when I read that.
What an athlete chooses to do in the face of such a situation in his or her home country is a choice only that athlete can make, let's get that stated first. For one thing, we hardly know what the managers or "handlers" of the Ukrainian team are telling them; it's entirely possible they aren't being allowed to go home even if they want to. Secondly, unless on speaks up, we don't really know what the athletes of Ukraine actually think about the protests; they could all be pro-Yanukovych for what we know. Thirdly, speaking up at this point could cause trouble or even danger for them, later if not now.
Don't lose focus, kid, you've got a slalom run to make.
But for Bach, what matters is that they stayed in place and kept playing their games like good little servants of the Olympic movement. All that stuff about people dying back home (possibly friends or -- God forbid -- family members) is unimportant in the face of our games.
This points toward one of the oddities of the Olympic movement: as it has through the years claimed a lofty ideal for itself as transcendent of politics, to the point of making the ludicrous semantic distinction of individual competitors as the participants in the games despite the rather obvious national-team aspect of the games, the games have repeatedly bungled their way into political entanglements throughout their modern history. At times the games have gotten in trouble for their location (think the 1936 games in Berlin, or the boycotted 1980 games in Moscow), at others for their rank insensitivity to politicized (sometimes violent) events going on around them (the 1972 terrorist hijacking/murder of Israeli athletes in Munich). The page linked here offers up a number of such entanglements amidst the doping, cheating, and scoring scandals of more routine vintage.
Remember 1972? The IOC would rather you wouldn't.
But still, the tone of Bach's pronouncements is rather vulgar, pointing to that kernel of corruption at the heart of what is actually called in some sources "Olympism." The idea that the world needs to stop for two weeks while a bunch of people play games is a bizarre bit of arrogance. Your human rights are being violated? Tough, wait 'til after the closing ceremonies to deal with it. Your own government is cracking down on you? How dare you protest while the figure skating competition is going on? There is something very close to idolatry at the core of the Olympic movement, which may have voiced in its origins the notion of a temporary halt to wars in its earliest days around 1900 but has failed to catch on to how that becomes an opportunity for the powerful to oppress the powerless in more recent years. I'm doubtful of how many protesters in Kyiv got all that excited about a gold medal in women's biathlon relay, being mostly concerned, I'd guess, with not getting killed and with protesting a corrupt government. Not even murder in 1972 nor 1996 could halt the games' celebration of itself.
This becomes inhuman in such a case. The basic fact of injustice isn't going to be solved by playing games, but the degree to which the games themselves become a means for the perpetuation and/or papering over of injustice -- whether by repressive governments using them as a propaganda smokescreen as in 1936 or 2008 or even this year) or by the horrors visited on a city's poor and oppressed in preparation for the games (looking at you, Rio) or by simply being tone-deaf as Bach to the unrest in Ukraine -- should cause anyone connected with them to blush with shame if nothing else. But the games go merrily on, congratulating themselves for the fact that Vladimir Putin didn't openly arrest any gay athletes during the event itself. Avery Brundage makes chummy with Adolf Hitler, IOC members get rich off potential host cities, political careers get launched (looking at you, Mitt Romney), and the games ultimately end up being, in terms of real justice in the world, part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
Hey, we're getting both the World Cup AND the Olympics! But that means your home has to go.
The self-perpetuation of the games requires, apparently, making nice with the not-nice. For an athlete who presumably just wants to compete against the best opponents out there, or the staff delegated to work with those athletes, it requires its own set of compromises, whether going back into the closet, being turned into a corporate shill just so you can get the equipment you need (and sometimes one in order to be the other), or pretending your home country isn't in flames. That these are at all necessary for what is supposed to be this grand celebration of sport and international brother/sisterhood yada yada yada...the Olympic movement ends up looking and smelling like a big ol' idol that demands its tribute.
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