You may have noticed that the 2016 Olympic Games are about to start somewhere ... oh, yeah, they'll be in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Almost forgot.
When the last Games came around (the Olympics really don't like it when someone who has not paid them a sponsorship ransom uses the word "Olympic", so I'll stop ... probably), I seem to recall that we were very anxious for them to start. We watched the opening ceremony, enjoyed the popular events like gymnastics, track and field, the marathon (OK, the last five minutes of the marathon), that sort of thing.
Tomorrow, I think but am not sure, the opening ceremonies will start in Rio. Maybe tonight.
And we couldn't care less.
Once in a while, some popular figure or, in this case, event, crashes to earth and disappears in a blaze of glory -- or a hot mess. The Games, at least the summer ones, are the latter. It's one thing to be opposed or criticized; at least that keeps you in the news where you can recover. It's quite another to lose your relevance. The Games have lost their relevance.
I don't even think it is that fuzzy as to what happened. At one time, the Olympics (oops, sorry, IOC) were looked at as a massive competition among the athletes representing their nations. We hated the Soviets and the East Germans and later, as they got better, the Chinese. The Soviets became the Russians and we still hated them, though a little less than when they were "stinking commies."
I think it started with the USA's loss to the Soviets in the basketball game 40 years ago, the one where the on-site Games officials had the ending replayed until the Soviets won. Perhaps we didn't think the Games were corrupt before, but we started to get the impression then.
Articles started to get written about the leadership of the International Olympic Committee, and how the IOC had grown essentially into its own country, with the immense power that comes with awarding the summer and winter contests to different world cities. We read how payoffs from prospective host cities fattened the wallets of IOC leaders, and we gradually assumed that the same corruption was oozing its way into the administration of the competitions themselves.
And we saw the host cities often lose hundreds of millions of dollars when the results didn't match their hubris.
Then there were the pros. Some people enjoyed the USA's "Dream Team" competing in basketball after the ban on professional athletes seemed to have melted away. Most Americans rooted for them; I simply changed the channel. It was the varsity competing against the middle-school team, and was embarrassing. I didn't root for the opposition, but I did change the channel. Dunking in someone's face is pretty bad sportsmanship and I didn't want my country represented that way.
This year? Well, after the scandals of the past few decades we have the Zika virus scaring many good competitors away from what was, also, a horribly-run city in a horribly-run country that had no business spending resources on two weeks of games. We have, even at home, breaking scandals about the sins of USA gymnastics coaches and the cover-up of their acts.
NBC has invested its usual ton on the Games, and I confess to being a bit sad because a very good man I have met and know slightly (although not through his work), John Miller, is the NBC executive responsible there. Everything that goes wrong and depresses viewership reflects on him and I don't like that to happen to a good man. It is not his fault.
But in a day or so I'm going to look up when the women's gymnastics are, and probably watch some of them (and likely little or nothing else); they're so earnest and amazing. Otherwise, the Games are too corrupt, too slick, too professional, too many other things that don't represent the concept of amateur competition they once were, or at least supposedly were (that Soviet Army sure had some coincidentally good athletes as recruits).
I miss the Games. But maybe not that much. R.I.P.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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