rebuttal to: one order of olympics, hold the politics
by Shane Nicholson
Published: April 9, 2008
Let me go ahead and let you in on this little-known secret: the Olympics are a political event.
Jesse Owens’ four gold medals at Hitler’s games - the result meant little more than a note in sports almanacs.
“Do you believe in miracles?!” How about, Do you believe in boycotts?
This ridiculous notion that the Olympic Games are not a political showcase is just that: ridiculous. If you want to believe that to be true, that this massive international event is only about 400 meter relays, skeet shooting and U-23 football, then the Chinese propaganda machine has got some wonderful stories for you to read.
According to the always reliable Chinese government, the persons protesting in London over the weekend and Paris on Monday were all just “Tibetan separatists.” Odd, because they looked quite a bit like middle-class Europeans, people about my age, invoking their right to protest what surely will be a lovely job of sweeping the dirt under the rug and sending the bastard child away for the weekend.
China is, by all factual accounts, the country presently on this Earth that actually represents every reason why we invade or feint invasion toward any other state. The human rights record is appalling; they actually possess nuclear weapons and aren’t afraid to show it; they can clearly threaten our aerospace superiority; their financial clout is the only legitimate contender to both our own and the EU’s; and they don’t care about any international treaties of any kind. They truly are the enemy as defined by us.
Yet the hypocrisy runs rampant. If we were honest with ourselves for just a few seconds we would already recognize that the Olympics haven’t been about sport for quite a while. If that were the case then the Dream Team would have never existed. The Soviet hockey sides that dominated Olympic ice for the better part of three decades would have never been. What other reason for these clubs to exist than to show whose dad can beat up whose? The facts are countries use the Olympics as a kind of international show and tell, the sort of rubbing it in that’s just not afforded by the UN.
So do we now disregard our own previous involvement in this decades old pony show? Do we ignore our boycott of the games in Moscow, or the inevitable response of the Eastern Bloc in 1984? Do we remove from the record all of the accounts of the 1976 gold medal game for basketball that politicized the event beyond belief, and likewise for the 1980 ice hockey semi-final that has enthralled the population for nearly three decades now? Never mind we still had to get through an impressive Sweden squad to actually win the gold; Russia was defeated!
Do we act like these games existed in a vacuum? That the result was only represented as a box score in scattered newspapers the next day?
Of course not. They meant more than that. They represented our country as a whole, each and every one of us. They weren’t just sporting events; they were watershed moments in history one way or the other. But now we’re all supposed to give China a free pass and pretend that they’re hosting these games for everyone’s benefit. Com’on guys, it’s just sports.
Really? Because it looks more like a worldwide showcase for China, and they shouldn’t be allowed to pick and choose what fills the two weeks of airtime NBC will provide them this summer. The Olympics mean more than that, and it’s important that we not pretend otherwise.
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(6)
April 28th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
Let’s not forget about the ‘56 “Blood in the Water” water polo game between Hungary and Russia.
April 29th, 2008 at 1:46 am
True mate, there’s a boatload of events I could do a roll call on. Tough to overlook Zador’s bleeding face of course, but I’ve gotta squeeze it all in under my word count.
Keep reading, love the comments from time to time.
Cheers,
-Shane