If you asked me to choose between watching the 2006 Olympic Winter Games and, say, resurfacing an entire hockey rink with my own tongue, it would be no contest: I’ll take the rink, thanks.
The Olympic Games are supposed to be about the nobility of sport and the simple joys of physical achievement, a peaceful gathering of the world’s youth where nations vie in a friendly tournament of athletic will and mutual understanding. Faster, Higher, Stronger, and so on.
I come today to tell you that this is horseshit.
From the aesthetic abomination of the opening ceremonies-like a superbowl halftime show that lasts three ear-bleeding hours-to the simpering, idiotic news coverage that saturates the evening news, to everyone’s feigned surprise at the inevitable doping scandal, to the vulgar hectoring of sponsoring companies, eager to cash in on the cheap patriotism that surrounds the whole event like a toxic stink, the Olympic Games need to be snuffed out and reborn.
Don’t misunderstand me: some sort of international gathering for amateur sport is needed, and the achievements of young athletes at the peak of their physical perfection need to be acknowledged. But the Olympics are a pale reflection of this ideal, being mostly about money, blubbery nationalism, and dubious construction contracts.
The Olympic Industrial Complex is a multi-billion-dollar machine, chewing up and spitting out the unfortunate cities that continue to bid for the chance to host the misbegotten two-week fracas. For the sake of keeping International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogges and his IOC aristocrats knee-deep in caviar, the poor citizens of Torino, Beijing, Vancouver, and cities of the damned yet to come toss truckloads of government cash onto the pyre of fiscal ruin, bravely boasting that they will be the first in history who actually make a net profit on the Games, while the media snicker behind their notebooks.
For those of us not actually in the host city, life is hardly better: the evening news is unwatchable, filled wall-to-wall with glassy, jet-lagged reporters peppering you with pointless statistics, drippily sentimental profiles of Canadian athletes who either did worse or better than expected, or hollow indignation when some previously unknown ski-bot from a former eastern bloc country finishes the luge a trillionth of a second faster than the current record holder. I would have to devote a separate editorial to the grisly spectacle of figure-skating.
I don’t say this to be a spoilsport: just the opposite. Sport is being spoiled by the Olympics, that bloated, lumbering, grasping organization which is dedicated to nothing but its own high-flying existence, while hard-working Canadian athletes toil at minimum-wage jobs in between their training sessions to pay for their own protein powder and spandex onesies. It’s time to drop that Olympic torch and let it sputter out permanently-the athletes of the world will go Faster, Higher, and Stronger without the dead weight of the Olympic machine shackled to their ankles.
