Same old Olympic hype rings so hollow

Aug 7 2008 Sean McGuire Liverpool Daily Post

THE long seven-year wait will end tomorrow as the Olympic Games will open in Beijing. The city has been the most controversial host city for a generation, since Moscow in 1980, and it has been dogged by criticism from the moment it was awarded the honour in 2001.

However, most of the criticism is outdated. It has measured the standards of China’s capital city against a romanticised notion of host cities. Of Athens hosting the first modern Games or Paris in 1924, as idealised in the film, Chariots of Fire, or London holding a post-war celebration of friendship.

But it is time that the notion of the Olympic ideals were consigned to the history books. The ideals of Pierre de Coubertin and the modern Games’ founders no longer apply – and haven’t for some years.

Politics, money and drugs have slowly eroded the Olympian spirit beyond a point of no return.

The tit-for-tat withdrawal of American and Soviet athletes for the Moscow and Los Angeles Games, Ben Johnson’s drug-induced 100m world record in Seoul and the tainted memory of Marion Jones’s triumphs in Sydney, and the commercial excesses of Atlanta are more memorable than almost all of the action within the sporting venues.

For most of the participants at the Games it is the pinnacle of their career, and it is unrealistic that in this professional age to expect every participant to be bound by the notion of fair play and goodwill.

While this view may be cynical it is realistic. And it also supports the choice of Beijing, which on nearly all considerations should not be hosting the event.

The International Olympic Committee likes to claim at each closing ceremony, with the notable exception of Atlanta, that it has been “the best games ever”. It will almost certainly do so again this time.

Such a statement is typical of the crassness of the governing body and its fondness of spin.

By clinging to its heritage it instead projects an image which does not stand up to scrutiny.

The lustre of the Olympics has been replaced by the lustre of money yet we will have to put up with saccharine coverage for the 16 days of competition before the closing ceremony on August 24.

Tales of the unlucky and the nearly-men will be varnished with an unedifying gloss of amateurism, of heroes vanquished without the glory. All told with rose-tinted Olympic glasses firmly in place and ignoring the professionalism behind the performances and the profit that flows from the glory.

That is not to quibble at the athletes being rewarded for their talent and dedication, but let’s not pretend there is some higher goal.

No other sporting event is treated in the same manner and the Olympics no longer deserve their elevated treatment. It is time it was brought down from its pantheon.