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Like millions of other Scots I was glued to my television screen as the British women’s curling team captured Olympic gold. Curling had suddenly become exciting; these modest and unassuming women had become a source of pride for a small nation. Their treatment at the hands of the English based media (the BBC’s Steve Rider chief amongst them) seemed to galvanise the Scottish press and, by extension, the Scottish people. This was the Olympic dream played out in full, glorious Technicolor: amateur sportsmen and women driven by the desire to reach the pinnacle of their chosen pursuit finally getting payback for years of training and sacrifice. This was the type of triumph the Olympics are supposed to represent. That ideal, however, is now horribly tarnished.
For every rink of unlikely Scottish heroines there is a row over judging. For every Cathy Freeman there is a political storm. For every Marion Jones there is a CJ Hunter. It would be easy to say that the Olympic flag was forever soiled by the Nazi circus of Berlin in 1936. Certainly the decision to allow Hitler a legitimate propaganda machine was indefensible but other organisations have never received the same level of vilification for their interludes with Nazism: the decision of the English Football Association to force English players to perform a Nazi salute before a game against Germany was sickening and shameful. Indeed the Olympic ideal triumphed over Hitler when he was at his most powerful. Jesse Owens became a symbol of our times by achieving his ambitions in the face of fascism. The decline of the Olympic spirit belongs to the later Olympiads of the twentieth century.
The death of 11 Israeli athletes at the hands of Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Games of 1972 has become inexorably linked with the history of the Olympics. This was a horrifying example of people seeking to make a political point by using the incredible publicity that the Games can generate. Lessons should have been learnt from that tragic, almost unthinkable, sequence of events. The idea of the Olympic Games as a showcase for personal prowess but also as an engine of friendliness and hope in a changing world should have been given top billing at all future Olympiads. That, perhaps, was what the IOC hoped to achieve by sending the Games to Moscow in 1980. Rather it sent the Olympic Games into the thick of the Cold War crossfire. The American boycott (which Thatcher’s government hoped to replicate by bombarding British athletes with anti-Soviet propaganda) overshadowed a lot of what followed in Russia. The US got their revenge in 1984 at the LA Games. The IOC had sold themselves as a political football to be kicked between the twin evils of Soviet totalitarianism and cringe making American Coca-Cola nationalism. The “Miracle on Ice” hockey clash of the two superpowers in the American Winter Games of 1980 was less about sport and more about the trumped up arrogance of the two superpowers. The foundations for the present malaise had been laid.
The Olympics returned to America in 1996. Atlanta carried its own – lesser – terrorist scare and finally seemed to mark the victory of the dollar over the true Olympic spirit. Viewers around the world sensed that Games had become little more than a vehicle for advertising agencies and turned off in their droves. Olympic arenas should be centres of sporting excellence not Times Square write large The millennium Olympiad in Sydney went some way to restoring our faith but the positives of Australia have been all but lost since. The bribery cloud that hangs over the present Salt Lake City Winter Games has left a bad taste that has been heightened by the award of the 2008 Summer Games to Beijing. In the middle of all this the IOC has sought to prove that it remembers its roots by giving the 2004 Summer Games to Athens. This act of largesse may prove to be problematic: it is still unclear if Greece shall be ready to host the event and Sydney has been placed on emergency standby.
In light of the political controversies that surround the decision making processes of the IOC it would be easy to lose track of the athletes. Sadly competitors have also tried to drain the patience of spectators and viewers. The most obvious example is, of course, Ben Johnson. His 100 metres run in Seoul looked to have been one of the most incredible performances the Games have ever seen. Today it survives only in infamy, the most famous positive drugs test the sporting world has ever seen. Johnson, cast out and reduced to running exhibition races against animals like an act at a Victorian freak show, has become the best known Olympic cheat of all time. He is not, however, alone in the hall of shame. Every Olympics now has its fair share of drug controversies. As Marion Jones ran into gold for America her husband CJ Hunter was banned from competing in Sydney. In Salt Lake City the Russian team are pondering withdrawal after an abnormality in a routine drugs test. Meanwhile every skating medal is now subject to intense scrutiny after a French judge voted for a Russian pair who scarcely deserved the gold. A sport that is forced to award two gold medals because the judging system is flawed requires urgent surgery. The Australian crowds who did so much to contribute to the spectacle of Sydney have been replaced by the jingoistic Americans: a British competitor in the bobsleigh has claimed a coin was thrown at him during his second run. Drugs, contested results and crowd violence are not the stuff of which Olympic Games are made.
The acceptance of professionalism and the advent of instant worldwide communications forced the Olympic movement into change. On the whole the reaction to those changes has been poor. The Olympics has become another part of the worldwide media circus. Coca-Cola and Macdonald’s are in danger of replacing the Olympic rings as the symbols of the world’s premier sporting event. The once noble pursuit of excellence is still in evidence: Ian Thorpe, Steve Redgrave and Janic Kostelic are proof of that. It runs side by side, however, with the spectre of blind ambition and the lure of untold riches persuading people to turn to artificial enhancements to attain a higher level of performance. The IOC has become a bureaucratic behemoth packed with rivalries and gold diggers. The likely decision to award the 2012 Summer Games to New York will not help clean up the image. Other cities have suffered disasters and not been awarded an Olympiad as a means of recovery (Wembley hosted in 1948 but a Blitz ravaged London was a very different proposition to post- September 11 New York). America holds a special charm for the IOC because it dangles the irresistible carrot of the dollar: the quality of the Games is secondary. For most onlookers Atlanta was proof that America does not deserve to host the Games as often as it has done recently. The greed of the IOC and the dishonesty of certain participants are ruining the Olympics for the general public. The immediate future seems to offer little chance of recovery for the tainted spirit of the modern Olympics.
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