Commentary

The Olympics Are Finished -- But We'll Always Have Paris!

• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, over 1 hour ago

I have to confess: The Olympics sucked me in again.

Prior to the kickoff in Paris, I was unusually ambivalent about the Olympics. Given the debacle that was the spectator-less Tokyo Olympics, it was like the world had agreed not to expect too much from these games. Were the Olympics still relevant? Do we need them anymore?

I caught the opening ceremonies and was still skeptical. It was very Parisienne – absolutely breathtaking, with a healthy dose of “WTF.” Still, I was withholding judgement.

But by day three, I was hooked. I had signed up for the daily Olympic news feed. I was watching Canada’s medal count. I was embarrassed – along with the rest of the nation - by our women’s soccer team’s drone spying scandal. I became an instant expert in all those obscure sports that pique our interest on a quadrennial cycle. I could go on at length about the nuances of speed climbing, slalom canoe or B-Boy breaking.

The Olympics had done it again. Paris did not disappoint.

So, this last Sunday night, I watched the closing ceremony with all the feels you get when you have to say goodbye to those new friends you made as you board the bus taking you home from summer camp. Into this bittersweet reverie of video flashbacks and commentators gushing about this international kumbaya moment, my wife had the nerve to kill my vibe by commenting that “there must be a better use for all the billions this game cost.”

It's hard to argue against that. The estimated total cost of the games was 9 billion euros, or almost $10 billion U.S. You don’t need to be particularly jaded to realize that the Olympics are really a spectacle for rich nations. Sure, any nation can send a team, but if you combine the 40 smallest teams - coming from places like the Sudan, Chad, Namibia, Lesotho and Belize -- you’d have a total of 120 athletes. That would be about the same size as the Olympic team from Denmark, the 25th largest team that attended.

The Olympics are supposed to offer an opportunity to those of all nations, but the bigger your GDP (gross domestic product) the more likely you are to end up with a medal around your neck.

So, I come back to the question: Do we still need the Olympics, if only to break the relentless downward spiral of our horrific news cycle for 16 brief days?

Before we get too gooey about the symbolism of the Olympics, we should take a look back at its history.

Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who revived the modern Olympics, did so because he was fascinated by the culture and ideals of ancient Greece. The original Olympic Games were essentially a chance for city states to “one-up” their rivals. A temporary truce was in place during the games but behind the athletic competitions, there was a flurry of alliances and back-room deals being made to gain advantages when Greece went back to its warlike ways after the games.

The idea that the modern games are a symbol of equality and fraternity was -- at best – tangential to Coubertin’s original plan. He wanted to encourage amateur competition and athletic prowess because he believed better athletes made better soldiers. The Games were also an attempt to keep amateur sports in the hands of the upper classes, out of the grimy grips of the working class.

Let’s also not forget that women were not allowed to participate in the games until the second Olympiad -- the original Paris Olympics in 1900. There were five female athletes and almost 1,000 men participating. And even then, Coubertin was not in favor of it. He later said women competing in sports was “impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic, and we are not afraid to add: incorrect.”

Even the much-commented-on Olympic tradition of athletes at the Opening Ceremonies coming in divided by nation, but at the closing, all athletes coming in as one, without national divides, was never part of the original plan. That was added by the Aussies in the 1956 Melbourne Games, which would be called the “Friendly Games.” It was put forward by John Ian Wing, an Australian teenager who wrote an anonymous letter to the IOC suggesting the idea. He didn’t put his name on it because he was afraid of the backlash his family (who were Chinese) might receive.

 Let’s get back to today. Paris excelled at pulling off a delicate balancing act. The hope to make these the “Games wide open” was realized at the opening ceremonies, the marathons and the men’s and women’s road races. In the case of the latter, over a million spectators lined the streets of Paris.

The organizing committee managed to balance the French flair for spectacle with a tastefulness that was generally successful. They gave the modern Olympics at least four more years of life.

It remains to be seen whether the inevitable bombast that comes when the Games move to Los Angeles in 2028 will continue the trend -- or put the final nail in the coffin.