WASHINGTON — The summer Olympic are upon us, and already they
are spoiling things for those of us who like our summers restful
and given over to reasonable pageantry, particularly pageantry in
London. For those of you who have not been made aware of it, the
Olympics are in London this summer, which is about as appropriate
as holding the world gun fight championships in Rome just across
the palazzo from the Vatican, if there are world gunfight
championships. The gunfight championships should be held in an
appropriate setting like Kabul or some Middle Eastern metropolis
along with the world car bombing championships. London should be
off limits for tasteless vulgarity.
In summer London is one of the loveliest cities on earth, and
certainly among the most sophisticated. But how will we enjoy
Shakespeare in the park or great concerts, or the British
Spectator’s annual summer party, when thousands of
athletes are being offloaded from airplanes and preparing for their
multitudinous over-hyped contests? There will be media and of
course idiotic sports writers. There will be purveyors of sports
equipment and even more egregious commercial interests. The Giant
Corporations will be on hand to sell automobiles, perhaps even
agricultural equipment and maybe gigantic land movers. Can you see
Michael Phelps wearing a high tech swimsuit driving up in a John
Deere e-series Wheeled Harvester and saying, “I go everywhere in my
John Deere”? There will be ads for junk foods, nutritional foods,
beer, and countless other products — all proud sponsors of the
Olympics and the “Olympic Spirit.”
Well, count me out! I shall announce it here and now. I have
slapped a boycott on this year’s summer Olympics. I shall not even
attend the Spectator’s summer party, and I especially
relish it. There are journalists, serious writers like the great
Paul Johnson, and many pretty girls, some wearing hats. They serve
Pol Roger chilled to perfection. All you can drink! Alas, I shall
stay at home.
Even back in the Cold War period when the Soviet stallions and
geldings were flaunting their pharmaceutically enhanced muscles I
opposed the Olympics. I swam on a swimming team (Indiana
University’s) with teammates that actually were Olympians and world
record holders. They accused me of being miffed about never making
it to the Olympics. Of course, I never made the team. I hardly made
it into the viewing stands for the Olympic trials. Yet, as it
turned out I did not have to make the team. Bob Knight, the
legendary Indiana basketball coach, had it right when he said,
“Tyrrell, as your writing career has prospered your athletic career
has too.” Yes indeed, I am often introduced as a former world-class
swimmer so why should I have bothered training and missing out on
all the fun of a college boy. I had the best of it: a lot of fun in
college and no long hours in the pool. The legend will never
die.
Yet back to the Olympics. The Olympic spirit died sometime back
in the 1930s when Hitler politicized what the founder of the modern
Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, envisaged as an apolitical
celebration of health and athleticism. Stalin continued Hitler’s
work. With the dictators’ politicization came another body blow to
old Pierre’s Olympic Ideal, the end of amateurism. All athletes
from totalitarian countries and from nationalistic countries were
essentially professional athletes. Now there is no distinction
between an amateur and a professional, and the crass
commercialization that has come to dominate the Olympics is
appalling. Moreover, in America the sentimentalization of Olympians
is positively sickening. Is there not one athlete, who made it to
the Olympics from the land of milk and honey, with a silver spoon
in his mouth, with parents who adored him, and one voluptuous break
after another? Did every member of the United States team have to
overcome hardship, rejection, episodes of poverty, and diseases
almost too horrible to mention — but not quite? We the public are
regaled with stories of what one prima donna athlete after another
suffered or thought they suffered.
This summer as the Olympics are perpetrated in I shall go down
to the neighborhood tennis court and watch the children and the old
folks play. A game is a game, and sometimes a game waged by
octogenarians is really heroic.
