OPINION & EDITORIAL
Olympic spoilsport
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Also by Kristin Wieben:
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- UW can do better (May 6, 2002)
- More to sex ed than abstinence (April 8, 2002)
- So I'm a pessimist (April 1, 2002)
- Madison's racist law (March 4, 2002)
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- When gold isn't gold; tarnished events, olympiad in Athens (September 1, 2004)
- Special Olympics joke not tasteful (October 6, 2004)
- Unlikely Olympian becomes unlikely hero (February 21, 2002)
- Letters to the editor -- 02/21/02 (February 21, 2002)
by Kristin Wieben
Monday, February 18, 2002
The modern Olympics were established in 1896 to celebrate “the glory of competition, free from all political and financial interference.”
More than a century has passed since founder Pierre de Couberin inaugurated the Games, but the Olympics are still a symbol for purity, brotherhood and community. We imagine they somehow float above the commercialization and avarice the rest of popular culture is soaked in.
Yeah, right.
Behind the touchy-feely bios and sappy stories of athletes who beat the odds, the Olympics, like everything else, revolve around one thing: money.
At a time when the Super Bowl is more about cutting-edge advertisements and tacky halftime entertainment than actual football, this shouldn’t be especially shocking news.
What makes the Olympics especially troubling is its hypocrisy. By continuing to hide behind its long-outdated mythic image, the Olympics demean all of the virtues they supposedly stand for.
Not convinced?
We know about the Salt Lake City Olympic Committee’s bribery, the steroid-abusing athletes and the vote-trading figure skating judges. Unfortunately, these scandals are just the tip of the iceberg. Here are five example of hypocrisy on a truly “Olympic” scale:
1) Supposedly chosen because they embody the Olympic spirit, the torch-bearers we see on TV are teachers, volunteers and heroes. What you won’t see on TV are the 137 NBC-affiliated torch- bearers cashing in on the benefits of sponsorship. But who knows—maybe fearless broadcasting really is the pinnacle of Olympic excellence.
2) Homeless people get completely screwed when the Olympics come to town. In an attempt to eradicate the city’s embarrassing and unsightly “undesirables” during the 2000 Summer Games, Atlanta “relocated” many of its homeless. The city also passed a number of ordinances that all but outlawed homelessness (for example, it became illegal to lie on a park bench).
In fact, the Olympics are also notorious for temporarily increasing homelessness. People are displaced as their landlords exponentially jack up rent in order to make money off of the out-of-town visitors.
3) Brotherhood and goodwill? Try “police state.” Security may be of the utmost important since Sept. 11, but the SLOC is taking it too far, and threatens to infringe on people’s First Amendment rights. Groups of would-be protestors must apply for permits to utilize one of seven specially set-aside “protest zones.” Contraband items in these zones include eggs, squirt guns, marbles, inner tubes, fishing line and yarn.
4) Forget about the rest of the world community—shamelessly using Sept. 11 as an excuse, the United States is using the Salt Lake City Olympics to push its own agenda and promote patriotism. Just because we’re the host country (thanks to massive bribes) doesn’t mean we own the Games. The French newspaper Le Monde summed up the rest of world’s sentiments when it described the opening ceremonies as “an exercise of exaggerated patriotism, combined with spectacle tilted toward bad taste.”
5) Couberin’s vision of “no financial interference” has been completely mutilated. Today, the Olympics are nothing but a thinly veiled marketing scheme. NBC doesn’t even pretend to cover the Olympics like a regular sporting event. Instead, it is a time-delayed prime-time special, more reminiscent of a Hallmark card than a competition. Corporate logos are everywhere—including all over the athletes’ bodies.
NBC and other sponsors, however, aren’t the only ones standing to profit from the Olympics. The IOC receives upwards of $60 million from every company that wants to use the Olympic Ring logo. The average ticket price is $82, although a prime seat at the Opening Ceremonies can go for upwards of $800.
In an attempt to make tickets more accessible to locals, the SLOC put aside a few “bargain” tickets for the Opening Ceremonies. At $320, however, these tickets were anything but a bargain.
Obviously, the Olympics are not the embodiment of purity and world brotherhood the media would have us believe. Behind the faŤade of feel-good clips urging us to root for underprivileged bobsledders from third-world countries lurks a far different sort of Games.
The greed and politicization would at least be understandable—although not excusable—if they did not go hand in hand with such shameless and blatant hypocrisy.
Commercializing and politicizing the Olympics only cheapens and degrades the things they supposedly stand for.
The ancient Olympics were suspended over 1,500 years ago by Roman Emperor Theodosius I because he complained the Games had become “nothing more than carnivals with athletes interested only in money.”
Unfortunately, we could take a lesson from that today.
Kristin Wieben (kwieben@badgerherald.com) is a sophomore majoring in political science and French.
