“Olympics for Sale”: Hey, that was more than two years ago. Way back then, when it was first revealed that Salt Lake’s Olympic organizers had made illegal payments to International Olympic Committee (IOC) members and their families, Michael Jordan was still soaring and John Elway was a Super Bowl quarterback. All ancient history in the world of sports.
The Games, once saddled with a $400 million deficit, are now projected to produce a tidy surplus, and all the buzz is of Michelle Kwan, Herman “Munster” Maier and Mario Lemieux. “The audience that is passionate about the Olympics cares about the athletes, not the old guys in ties that manage the Games,” says Mitt Romney, the white knight who assumed the postscandal Salt Lake Olympic helm.
That is fundamentally true. But when they meet this summer in Moscow, the guys (and now, even in the archconservative IOC, some gals, too) in ties will confront a pair of decisions about which we all should care deeply. There has been much talk of reform at the IOC. So far all that amounts to is that a few Third World delegates, who were more obviously greedy, have been dumped, and a few new rules have been written down. But the proof, as they say, is in the pudding. And the pudding will definitely be on the burner in Moscow. The decisions rendered there will say a great deal about the future of the Olympics and reveal how seriously the IOC brass takes reform in the wake of the failures and scandals of the past.
The first will be a successor (finally) to Juan Antonio Samaranch. That selection will be hard for the public to read, as most of the contenders are as anonymous as any government bureaucrats. (American IOC vice president Anita DeFrantz is a long-shot candidate.) But right on the heels of that selection will come a potentially far more controversial one: the selection of a site for the 2008 Games.
Samaranch has long dreamed of bringing the Games to Beijing, but the city has been passed over before. Now the IOC has already, at least in word, virtually awarded the 2008 Games to the Chinese capital over the four other contenders (Paris, Toronto, Osaka and Istanbul). The big Olympic sponsors too have fantasized about a major market incursion into China under the umbrella of the five rings. They feel they’ve waited long enough. Concerns about the inadequacy of the infrastructure to accommodate the Games or the absence of far-reaching environmental planning are being ignored.
But the one concern that can’t be dismissed so blithely is human rights. Not that the IOC wouldn’t mind doing so. Samaranch cut his teeth during Spain’s Franco regime, and the IOC’s level of enlightenment in the human-rights arena is only slightly more elevated. Indeed the IOC loves to argue that the Games are, in fact, an assurance of progress on the human-rights front, kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But its more likely just wishful thinking. There is no historical evidence that such an argument is anything but specious. And the backlash against awarding the Games to Beijing has begun. Opposition to Beijing 2008 has new momentum in the wake of widespread revelations about Chinese oppression of the Falun Gong spiritual movement as well as a recent Amnesty International report that says the practice of torture is growing in China.
The IOC is currently enduring a rather painful watch on Athens’s progress toward the Summer Games in 2004. The city’s Olympic plans are way behind schedule, and there are significant concerns about Greece’s ability to handle any terrorist threat. The IOC even flirted with the notion of taking the Games away from Greece but now seems committed to sticking with Athens. Which means that the IOC will be sweating it out for a full three years until 2004. If Athens is nervous-making, Beijing could be far worse, a seven-year sweat with the knowledge that, at any time, there is the potential for another Tiananmen-like horror.
The IOC has always appeared to be blessed with an almost genetic immunity to embarrassment. But the Olympic movement is no longer bulletproof. Sydney was a rollicking success that belies the fragile hold that the Olympics has on the world’s populace. It may still be tuning in by the billions (the whole rest of the world watched even if the U.S. didn’t in its usual numbers), but China has a unique potential to destroy what remains of the Games’ charms.
The images remain too strong, even after 65 years, to forget the embarrassment of the 1936 Berlin Games. America has always reveled in the stories of how Jesse Owens showed up Hitler and his “superman” notions. But the Olympic spectacle provided Hitler and his henchman with a unique international showcase, not to mention a legitimacy in the eyes of the world. And the American apologists at the helm of the U.S. Olympic team accommodated the fascists.
We were only recently reminded, with the death of the great sportscaster Marty Glickman, of the grotesquerie. Glickman was yanked from the U.S. 4x100 relay team because he was Jewish. The shame of that decision rightfully lingers. The American boosters of Beijing, as well as those worldwide, better consider now what shame they might be prepared to live with this time around.
