On The Grotesque Nature Of The Olympic Games

A delightful rant.

ON THE GROTESQUE NATURE OF THE OLYMPIC GAMES

    Vancouver, British Columbia, is an aesthetically pleasing city.  If you ignore the areas of blight, as most residents do, you will find Paradise.   Oceanfront views are still easily accessible from mountains which cradle towering blue and green; the blue and green of the magically translucent urbanity that rests below.  The greater area is an outdoor enthusiast’s Mecca.  But I’ll tell y’all something here, Sports Fans: if I lived on the lower mainland for the duration of the upcoming Olympic Games, I would stay inside and lock my doors.

    For it is my conviction, Dear Readers, that your beloved Olympics are nothing more than a storefront.  At best they are a vehicle for athletic achievement made cumbersome by political posturing and corporate campaigning.  At worst they are a very deliberate and fraudulent sham.  

    I contend that the Olympics are not about uniting the world, nor are they intended to rejuvenate cultural cooperation and understanding.  And the athletes are not the key players.  Not any more.  The Olympics serve as a distraction from a global economic system in need of repair.  They are a justification of elitist capitalism, and for a few weeks an entire city is transformed into a suffocating billboard, and branded in the names of the highest bidders.  

    Country A is marred with a doping scandal, while Country B boycotts the event in protest of Country C’s inclusion.  It’s all one messy soap opera, and it’s brought to you by your friends at NBC.  An emulsifying socio-political leper thinly veiled as sport.

    It wasn’t always this way.  Avery Brundage, president of the IOC from 1952 - 1972, warned against the commercialization of the Games.  He felt that a corporate connection with Olympic events would tarnish the Games’ image and credibility.  Yet by the 1960 Winter Olympics in Tahoe, California, Olympic corporate sponsorship had arrived to stay.  Now fifty years later television lobby groups, the largest sponsors of the Games, have even exercised the power to dictate when certain events will be held to coincide with television viewing and advertising patterns!  This is not a sporting event any more.  It is a television program.  The Olympics are now rendered merely a conglomerate of filthy brands; one universal symbol to caricature this golden, sinking ship we’re stuck on.  

    And you are only a spectator in these Games.  But perhaps you can get a little closer to that participatory feeling somehow.  Maybe buying a four dollar Gatorade at the SONY Pavilion will remind you that you made it - you’re really THERE.  Life ain’t so bad after all.  That‘s right, B*****s, the Olympic Games are truly the mercantile world’s greatest window dressing.  A couple weeks during which the elitist of the elite of the western world slap each other on the backs and the rest of us look in.  We are not actually allowed in the store because we’re not really as rich as we’re told.  And not everything in our dream world is perfect.  

    Our so called Western Values are not always without flaw.  And not everything in our squeaky clean sponsored white world is as it seems.  Yet for two weeks one wealthy city gets to play the prostitute Oz.  That glimmering capitalist candy store which turns a once decent place to live into a decadent whorehouse.  The ocean playground that was Vancouver a moment ago becomes, in a spark in time, a diseased circus.  

    The Olympic Games, and the city which plays host to this infection, represent more than sport.  Truly they encompass our ailing Way Of Life, and by association an event that may have once been noble is now rendered sick.  Vancouver, British Columbia, is now indeed the world’s gaudiest advert.  A metropolitan testament to consumerism and a distraction from an economic system that is tired and unstable.  

    The celebration of these Games cannot be ignored once they have infested their host city.  If you have any access to the internet or television during these dark days the Olympics will find you.  The Olympics will make their way into your home every time you try to read the news.  You will get the latest unwanted updates concerning the lamest unwanted sporting events every time you check your email.  And you can thank Daimler Chrysler for providing you with the gossip.

    You can also be sure that the most devious, wretched political manoeuvring possible will take place behind the scenes during the Games, but nobody will notice.  Just a supplementary benefit for the crafty.  There’s a proposed bylaw to allow methamphetamine content in Starbuck’s House Blend?  Push it through during the Games.  Everyone will be distracted by a stunning biathlon performance.  Need to approve a bill giving cops access to mustard gas?  Stamp that b***h up when the rest of the world is glued to the newest luge record.  All of this coincides with a lazy journalist’s wet dream: a popular story back by demand that runs straight into you.  It’s easier than hunting down an original story because people would rather watch figure skating.  And it’s definitely easier than writing a story about the mustard gas bill, because figure skating is more popular than uncomfortable truths.

    Two weeks of shimmering distraction, saturated with ads.  Ads from all over the planet, telling us that the system’s working.  The system is working for those nations privileged enough to have funds to devote towards ludicrous, pompous displays like national sporting teams.  Only the offensively rich nations can throw away tax dollars on games they use as makeup.  Other governments, the ones that don’t win gold medals, have other things to spend their budgets on, like hospitals.  Yet out here we‘re watchin’ the television, saying “Hey, the economy’s fine.  Hell, look at all the money we could afford to waste on constructing that bobsled course!”  

    But the system is not fine.  The Olympic Games are not fine.  It is our collective, undoubting suspension of disbelief that allows this tragic event to continue every two years.  Reason and history tell us that most Olympic Games have been financially catastrophic to their host cities.  And yet we feel compelled to bid for our chance to host these events time and time again.  Lining up to be the grandest of the losers.  Never learning the lessons of the past, never looking to broken cities that wasted their funds on now rarely used and under funded Olympic infrastructure.  
    
    More cities have lost overall monies by hosting the Games than have gained.  And yet the appeal of hosting the Games still remains - not only in the prestige, but also in the perceived revenues!  Tourist dollars and demonic multinational company sponsorship are anticipated to offset the costs of building stadiums, athletic residences, and everything else under the sun.  The problem is, this rarely happens.  More often than not the host city is strapped for cash immediately following the event.  Revenues rarely meet construction costs, especially in our atmosphere of skyrocketing inflation.  

    Alas.  Some things, as evil as they are, cannot simply be cancelled.  Perhaps the Olympics are too far gone to halt now.  The sport has become a show, and the show has snowballed into a comedy of failed enterprise that seems bent on its own recycled failure. They are akin to a Family Circus comic: inexplicitly terrible, but somehow an unrelentingly permanent force.  The mere survival of entities such as the Olympic Games and Family Circus is proof of this collective suspension of disbelief.  We are making something we know to be fundamentally lame and un-cool into the most anticipated event of the year.  

    Take the luge for example.  The LUGE?  Deep down, you KNOW that s**t’s not cool.  If I wanted to watch somebody laying on their back stiff as a board whilst feigning skill and prowess, I’d still be with my ex.  So where is this market for things like the luge?  You don’t give a damn about it for 360 days of the year, but you’ll be enthralled with all the excitement luge can offer as soon as some corporate sponsor creates that suspension of disbelief for you.  Then you’ll turn on the television along with everyone else.  And the luge will rape your mind like the Olympics rape a city.  This doesn’t matter, though, ‘cause next time around you’ll lap it all up again.  

    Though such a monumental municipal death wish as the Olympics would seem to ward off prospective host cities, it only attracts them more.  Cities yearn for the Olympics like a rabid dog thirsts for the dripping bone.  A lustful hallucination before the slow, resultant decay.  

    And what will our dear Vancouver be left with?  What are we going to find sprawled within this bloody Olympic wake?  A pampered plaything or a ravaged tramp?

    I think we are going to be left with a city abandoned with expensive athletic facilities that the permanent population is too small to adequately use or support or fund.  I think we are going to be left with a city of vacant hotels, built in the bloodlust feeding frenzy of construction speculation that preceded the Games.  
    
    I think that we are going to be left with a city that has somehow managed to even further isolate the most destitute and neglected citizens within her borders.  I think the social issues of places such as the Downtown East Side are going to be wiped further under the carpet.  The poverty and despair will still exist within Vancouver; indeed it will swell as a result of this athletic carnival.  Only now this poverty and despair will be displaced into new areas.  Areas far away from the Olympic Village where the rich will dwell.  Away from once affordable areas, now gilded by hungry developers who forget the Games don’t last an eternity.  

    But the Games are, thank goodness, finite.  Only their legacy of displacing poverty, complicating transportation infrastructure, increasing property taxes, and creating a long term real estate vacuum will remain after the Coca Cola clad curlers have left town.  

    If you’re looking for pre-determined havoc and unsustainable development precariously bonded together only by the semen of short sighted landlords, then look to the Olympic Games.  If you’re looking for a truly unifying event or sport, perhaps it’s time to set your sights elsewhere.

    Given the offensive, masturbatory rich - white - kid mentality of the Olympic Games, and given that I don’t enjoy watching privileged jocks giving high - fives in between Subaru commercials, I have embarked upon a quest to find something of value in this world.  Something pure, unpolluted, and sincere.  It sure as f**k isn’t the luge.

    I have, upon serious academic musing, determined that my search for real universal cooperation and truth must start with RoboCop.  It will be a tiresome journey.  Yet have patience, Dear Reader, and one day I will guide you to that magical place where this mad hunt for Sincerity finally ends.