ninme

The Times - Olympic ideals? What nonsense
The Games are not full of comradely spirit. They are the most cut-throat event you can imagine, by Matthew Syed

Is there, in the history of human literature, a document more spuriously idealistic, more breathtakingly drunk on its own self-importance, than the Olympic Charter? It is all “preservation of human dignity” this and “harmonious development of man” that, as if the quadrennial festival, so beloved of dictators and tyrants, is about something more than one talented athlete trying to deny another a place on the podium.

Even at its most gallant - with sportsmen competing within the rules and not doped to their eyeballs on designer steroids - the Olympic Games are about nothing more than the naked pursuit of personal glory. I played in two Olympics and, in the first, had a gratifying victory over a taciturn if talented Frenchman. Call that a celebration of the human spirit if you wish, but please forgive me for wondering if you have your head somewhere in the clouds above Mount Olympus.

The guardians of the Olympic movement, a self-perpetuating elite who enjoy grotesque levels of personal privilege, like to tell us that the coming together of the nations of the world within the Olympic Village is particularly worthy of celebration, a claim that would be no more comical if it were made by the organisers of a gigantic widget convention. …

None of this is to imply that I am against the Games. On the contrary, I love the Games: loved playing in them, love watching them, love writing about them. But it will not do, intellectually or morally, to impute to them a meaning that they do not possess except in the minds of those naive enough to swallow the propaganda of the IOC, an organisation so corrupt that its members deserve medals for spouting this idealistic nonsense with straight faces.

And:

Baron de Coubertin grasped that humans are not turned on by shared rewards but only by rewards that are denied to others. At bottom, the Olympic festival is capitalism without the subtlety: elitist, cruel and implacably amoral. That is why we enjoy it so much.

Heheheh.

Although yeah, this is great. This Olympics we might do without Katie Couric’s perky replacement reading perkily but woodenly from the sheet of bullet points about “peace” and “solidarity” since everyone’s finally admitting that it’s not. Pity I won’t be watching anyway. I’m not buying cable to get CBC just in case the networks covering the games are divertingly honest.