Shot puts and handjobs: It's the Olympics!
By Jim Washburn
Isn’t it long past due that the Olympics included a Shark Jumping event? The whole sweaty spectacle vaulted into inconsequence years ago.
Maybe the flip came in a moment in 1992, when the Olympics jettisoned its insistence on athletes’ amateur status to allow a Dream Team of America’s best, highest-paid pro basketball players, who proceeded to shove, bully, and foul poor Angola’s underfed team in their first game. The Olympics previously had stripped multi-event champ Jim Thorpe – one of the greatest athletes of all time and a great soul – of his 1912 Olympic medals merely for having played minor league summer baseball for $2 a game.
Or maybe it was the slow bloating of the Olympics, the ways it’s larded on new award categories more shamelessly than the Grammys. Twenty years ago, they somehow got by with 283 events in the combined Summer and Winter Olympics. Today there are 386, some added at the behest of NBC to attract a younger audience. You can expect to see Bungee Crunking any time now.
Let’s add a Bribe Handoff Relay too, for corrupt IOC officials, such as the ones who took bribes to steer the Winter Olympics to Salt Lake City in 2002, and perhaps a Bullion Toss to reflect the massive amounts of money the Olympic organization soaks up and never quite accounts for.
To honor this year’s host nation, add Smog Huff and Dissident Snuff events. Should China have been allowed to host the Olympics? Since I’m writing this on a computer made in China, on a table made in China, having just brushed with lead toothpaste from China, maybe I lack the moral standing to preach to China, though I do most certainly wish they were nicer to their own people, the Tibetans, the folks in Darfur, and the planet in general.
One argument is that hosting the Olympics gives China’s autocratic government publicity and credibility, and an excuse to pile even more repressive security atop their people. On the other side, the Olympics shines a light on the place, and perhaps brings more of the outside world and its ideas to people there. Granted, some made that argument about the 1936 Berlin Olympics. (That year’s boycott calls, claimed U.S. Olympic Committee head Avery Brundage, came from a “Jewish-Communist conspiracy.”) Yet Jesse Owens’s four gold medals didn’t exactly spur Hitler into an interracial lovefest.
I have a friend in Beijing working the Olympics and he says, yes, it’s smoggy, but we should cut the Chinese some slack, since they’re only some 15 years into their industrial revolution, and the U.S. pollutes more per capita. He finds the security atmosphere not much more oppressive than London’s closed circuit TVs on every block. The beer is cheap – 25 cents – and their lousy government aside, “the local population seems genuinely proud of the fact that their country is hosting the rest of the world. The average person seems to be stepping over themselves to try and give you a good impression of their city.”
To me, the biggest buzzkill comes from our friends at NBC, who pay in excess of $600 million to present the Olympics, and seem intent on turning every last dollar into shit. For one thing, you’re not oohing and aahing along with the rest of the world: You’re getting the Olympics on time-delay, chopped and shown to you at NBC’s convenience. Despite NBC’s ads touting the opening ceremony as “the greatest spectacle ever!” it wasn’t spectacular enough to preempt Merv Griffin’s Crosswords or Access Hollywood and was delayed some 11 hours.
Despite time zone and prime time concerns, if something of global significance is happening live, we deserve to share it live with the rest of the world. That sense of connection in the moment is worth the inconvenience. It’s why they don’t delay sunrise until a better timeslot.
Far worse is NBC’s practice of skipping event coverage – generally of competitors from other nations – to air gauzy backstory documentaries on athletes – generally American – designed to MAKE YOU CARE. It’s like all the shit at ballgames now – volcanoes in the outfield, rah-rah movie scenes on the Jumbotrons, etc. – to MAKE YOU CARE when there’s a home run, because, Christ knows, you couldn’t find your own way to that. So they help you along, sort of like a priest giving you a handjob.
Published: 08/13/2008
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