From the WSJ Opinion Archives
TASTE COMMENTARY
The Real History of the Olympics
And why they should come to an end.
Here's a proposal to increase harmony and goodwill among nations. Cancel the Olympics forever.
Pierre de Coubertin, the Frenchman who founded the modern Olympics and literally left his heart in Olympia, Greece (as decreed by his will; the rest of him is buried in Switzerland), envisioned nations using former battlefields for track and field. "Export our oarsmen, our runners, our fencers into other lands," he decreed. "That is the true Free Trade of the future; and the day it is introduced into Europe the cause of Peace will have received a new and strong ally."
It all sounds so wholesome and wonderful, along the lines of beating swords into ploughshares--or into a discus or two. But as an ally in the cause of peace, the Games have proven to be approximately as effective as their founder's home nation has been as an ally in war. They have sown strife in all sorts of ways, or given it a sporting chance. And they have given a big competitive push to bad behavior.
International hostility has had no difficulty finding its way into the arena, and in many cases the Olympic torch has inflamed nationalist feuds. In wartime the Games were simply cancelled (1916, 1940 and 1944). Germany and its World War I allies were not invited to the 1920 or 1924 Games. Germany and Japan were not invited to those of 1948. Major boycotts occurred in 1956, 1976, 1980 and 1984. The Soviet Union didn't attend until 1952, and even then it sent agents to shadow its athletes and prevent defections. The 1972 Games in Munich and the 1996 Games in Atlanta were playgrounds for terrorists. The 1936 Berlin Games were--and the 2008 Beijing games will be--propaganda coups for evil regimes seeking to put on smiley faces for the Katie Courics of the world journalism corps.
Conflict is one thing, conduct another, and here the Olympics deserve some sort of medal. They have managed to take mere athletes and coaches and turn them into masters of international intrigue, all along exalting the purity of athletic competition. Even the peaceful Olympiads are a circus of doping, cheating, corruption and bad sportsmanship. When the Olympic flame is lit, the world turns into hockey dads. Creative use of drugs has been central to the Olympics since at least 1904, when the winner of the marathon took strychnine and brandy. By 1956, it was common knowledge that many athletes were taking testosterone.
Of course there are plenty of ways to cheat without drugs. In 1900, three American marathoners at the Paris Games arrived at the finish line to discover that French runners they had never seen pass them had already won. The winners were the only contestants not spattered with mud. In 1908's London Games, an Italian runner collapsed trying to complete the marathon, but a British official literally dragged him across the finish line to beat a fast-closing American. After an investigation, the American was awarded the gold. The American contingent had earlier insulted the host nation by failing to dip its flag to the king during the opening ceremonies, a protest against the British rule of Ireland engineered by the team's Irish-Americans.
Chilling, scarcely veiled threats at matches have a long history, too. After a French fencer won a disputed match with an Italian rival during the "Chariots of Fire" Olympiad of 1924, the entire Italian team marched out singing the fascist anthem. The Times of London pleaded that the Olympics be discontinued, noting that the Games "exacerbated international bitterness."
Yet they continued and so did the cheating, often by the contest officials. In a 1972 basketball contest between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, time apparently ran out on the losing Soviets twice, but on both occasions referees put three seconds back on the clock. Given a third chance, the Soviets won the game and the gold. The timekeeper and one of the referees called the officiating illegal, but an American protest was rejected by a jury composed mainly of representatives of communist countries. In the 1988 Seoul Games, American light-middleweight boxer Roy Jones Jr. thrashed South Korea's Si-hun Park, landing 86 punches to Park's 32, but a panel of judges who were later linked to bribery in records held by the Stasi, or East German secret police, awarded the gold to Mr. Park.
Bad tempers survived the end of the Cold War. In 2002, after American speed skater Apolo Ohno won a race in which a South Korean was disqualified for obstructing his path, South Korea's media leaped at the chance to connect Mr. Ohno, who is half Japanese, to misdeeds by U.S. troops in Seoul and Japan's colonization of Korea. In the same Winter Games, French judge Marie-Reine Le Gougne said that she was pressured to help a Russian figure-skating couple win a gold medal over a clearly superior Canadian pair; observers speculated that France cut a deal so that the Russian judge would vote for France in another event. The Canadians, Jamie Salé and David Pelletier, were eventually awarded gold medals, but the Russian beneficiaries of the conspiracy were allowed to keep their gold also. The French judge, who later recanted her conspiracy story, was suspended for three years. Suspended? What does it take to get fired?
The Games are the reason that Nancy Kerrigan got kneecapped, Danish cyclist Enemark Jensen died under the influence of amphetamines, and hundreds of East German women were involuntarily turned into hairy testosterone-stuffed she-males. Olympic fever could even corrupt Mormons, and did.
Sure we can celebrate American victories, like our hockey team beating the USSR's in 1980 or Jesse Owens's victory at the Nazi Olympics of 1936, but globally speaking, the Games are at best zero-sum.
At the Winter Games, which begin today in Turin, Italy, the starting gun for scandal has already been fired. German officials have tried, so far unsuccessfully, to bar one of their figure-skating coaches, Ingo Steuer, following reports that in the 1980s Mr. Steuer was a Stasi agent who spied on his own country's biggest star, skater Katarina Witt. Meanwhile Zach Lund, an American athlete in the sport of skeleton (head-first sledding), has been issued a warning by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency for taking a steroid-masking drug, finasteride.
Why does fiasco have a near perfect record of attendance at the Olympics but not at, say, the Super Bowl? Why didn't Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger have to fear being sacked by a referee or kidnapped by Seattle agents? Here is George Orwell: "On the village green, where you pick up sides and no feeling of local patriotism is involved, it is possible to play simply for the fun and exercise: but as soon as the question of prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose, the most savage combative instincts are aroused.. . .[Nations] work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe--at any rate for short periods--that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue." As the announcers never tire of reminding us, an Olympic event is not just a game. That's the problem.
Mr. Smith is a movie critic for the New York Post.
