Olympic Dreams Drifting and Collapsing

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Values? The Olympics? Fixing the Games? As with the meaning of “education,” or “Christmas,” if we snooze on pondering the meaning of the Olympics then we end up drifting over to the default of other people’s values. Then we lose, as many other minds are “imprisoned” from having known almost only professional sports, or only the Olympics of the last few years. An imprisoned mind, if asked why male world sports for say, ice hockey and baseball are more valid than female sports, responds with, “Just because!” …but can’t say why.

Fixing the  Olympics remind me of a clown’s roof. The clown says, “If it’s raining I can’t fix the roof, and when it’s sunny the roof don’t need fixing.” Now the “rain” is ending in Tokyo, but maybe we will snooze without looking for any rainbow.

Are you and I doomed to be clowns? Maybe, as I have often read that a four year interval, between things like the Olympics and elections, is more than enough time for citizens to forget everything about any mismanagement. Or any needed reforms. 

I remember reading the newspaper about an Olympic figure skating scandal and marvelling, as I read, at how the reporter, and the editor too, could possibly have forgotten the previous ice skating scandal. No wonder there is so little follow up on, say, the Olympic committee staying in five star hotels—while dedicated athletes travel to their meets in poverty. Nor on the old, old issue of not having ex-athletes on the Olympic Committee. (Finally fixed, at least partially)

We can’t expect non-democracies to spend more time chewing over Olympic values that we ourselves do. There is a certain East African nation, which shall be nameless. According to a rumour I read, two Olympic runners from there innocently plotted. They decided the first runner would sacrifice  himself: He would run too fast, thus burning out himself and the other competitors. Then the second athlete would go on to win the medal for their country.

Is that your vision too? Athletes “sacrificing” themselves, athletes competing “for their country?” Maybe so, but let’s understand that originally there was no playing of any national anthem at the winner’s podium.

Should Olympians be the best “amateurs” in the world, or… the best “athletes?” If the latter, then by all means use professionals, such as the U.S. Dream Team, but let’s understand: The (basketball) Dream Team might walk away from excited naive Olympians at the athlete’s village, preferring to be with each other in a hotel lower down the mountain. Remember?

If your litmus for the Games is “professionals” then remember too that professionals feel badly treated by their owners, managers and coaches, badly enough to feel forced to unionize. Pros don’t “play” to “have a life.”

Do you think the Olympics should be able to ignore host country laws? The court in British Columbia,  before 2010, (see my previous essay) found that Canadian skiers “were discriminated against” but that the IOC was outside Canada’s jurisdiction.

I won’t give set-in-stone answers here about values and visions, because: The strength and purpose of dialogue is not unanimity of thought but free speech.  Without embarrassment. While our peace keepers serve in harms way, it is such dialogue, among citizens, that “close-minded” terrorists misinterpret as being the weakness of democracy. Not so. It is in fact our strength. It takes time for values and constraints to be finely tuned; it may take months, years, decades or more, to reach consensus, but surely this thinking can’t be done “for us” by some superior Ayatollah at lightening speed. No communist Party Line.

Liberty has a price. If you snooze you lose.

Having vision and perspective is too important to leave to the common athletes of the rank and file. Because, like good junior managers, they are simply too busy to be pondering abstractions, not like top executives must do. Striving athletes are reminders of the folk wisdom: You won’t be thinking about swamp hydro-gradients when you are up to your hips in alligators.

I knew an Olympian who was too busy: my roommate. He had been to the summer Games in Seoul and when I knew him he was training again. We talked as young roommates do. He didn’t know that, by Olympic values, it was only the media, and never the official Olympic committee, that tallies up medals by nation.

What he and I never discussed was this: Are those volunteer Olympians a means to an end, for example national glory, or an end in themselves? Let’s understand that glory can produce the 1936 “Nazi Olympics,” or the German Democratic Republic’s state doping scandal, or alleged “soldiers” of the Red Army being on salary to play “amateur” ice hockey, full time. 

I would ask my roommate, as the rain patters on our roof tonight: Shall we retire off to bed for the next four years? Or, without embarrassment, stay up to talk?

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Sean Crawford,

With an old Mount Royal College diploma in Leisure Services,

August 2021

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This essay was condensed from my popular old blog post, Olympics and Boards (Note: In a big business, while the senior executive’s objectives are measurable and accountable, the Board of Director’s role is to enforce hard to measure abstract goals)

My own thoughts on cheating: If a television network deliberately broadcasts the Olympics during the TV “rating sweeps,” or shows other special shows too, and then tries to charge higher advertising rates by pointing to their network’s “higher ratings…” would a seasoned businessman feel obliged to agree and then pay more? 

And if a cynical less democratic nation cheats, then should an idealistic democratic nation feel obliged to agree, and do likewise? My own thought is no, we should “play our own game,” but historically many of my countrymen would disagree with me.

Original Footnotes on Olympic Dreams:

~Update: Now it’s Canada that has a “dream team” equivalent—the National Hockey League players. With only ten months to go before the Games, according to yesterday’s CBC radio, they have a freight load of special demands, including wanting special accommodations that the other Olympians would not have. 

Obviously the “players” do not see themselves as excited fellow Olympians—so why the heck do they bother attending the Games?

~Canadian movie writer Jim Slotek, wrote, “Best line (and argument against NHLers playing) is the closing narrative: 

“The U.S. began using professional athletes at the games… Dream teams… (But) now that we have dream teams, we seldom ever get to dream.”