THE OLYMPIC GAMES AS FRAUD

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (4/10-08)

Originally, the Olympic Games were a place for athletes from throughout the world to compete with one another, striving for excellence. Then, they became an athletic contest between nations. A mixture of jingoism and athletics, the Olympic Games became the victim of jingoism with President Carter’s boycott of 1980.

Meanwhile, commercial global corporations took over the Games, becoming sponsors, advertising their wares. The Games became not only a mixture of athletics and politics, but also an advertising venue, like the Super Bowl. The civilized ideal of striving for excellence fell before the barbarisms of crass commercialism.

Nowadays, the Olympic Games are vehicles for nations to refurbish their tarnished images of brutality and poisoned products. A brief reprieve from this incidentalism of athletics occurred in 1936 when Jesse Owens triumphed in Nazi Germany’s Berlin, affirming human dignity and excellence in the face of a banal brutality, but since then the Games have slowly been sucked into the vortex of tawdry jingoism, sleazy advertising, and decadent deceit. Now, the host country for the Games has no more concept of human dignity than a rodent.

The current imbroglio with demonstrators trying to stop the progress of the Olympic torch points to the contradiction inherent in the present Games. The Communist Chinese are brutally repressing the Tibetans and Buddhist monks while fraudulently pretending to honor human achievement with global corporations, as usual, capitalizing on the fraud.

A boycott? The athletes should do it. The rest of us should ignore them, like bad jokes.

Copyright (c) Dana Prom Smith 2008