By Matthew G. Bisanz
Every two years, tens of thousands of athletes and spectators gather in a random city to compete and view the Olympic Games. For two to three weeks, the media is saturated with stories on which American lost to someone from a country most Americans can’t find on a map. Then, they’ll feature Americans who barely beat someone whose never set foot in a modern sports facility. Each Olympics is initiated and completed with ceremonies that rival any fine arts performance ever witnessed. These ceremonies and games usually take place in shiny new sports facilities constructed specifically for the Olympics.
However, under this bling-bling exterior lays an unimaginable level of waste and conspicuous consumption. In 1976, Montreal hosted the summer Olympics, but did not pay off the debt incurred until 2005. If you ask the average American what happened in 1976, they’ll say the Bicentennial. The same is probably true in other countries for their own historical anniversaries. In short, the frequency of the Olympics, combined with the vast number of medal events, makes them expensive, forgettable events.
The second fallacy of the Olympics is that they rise above politics and unite humanity in some sort of special relationship. Not true. As far back at 1904, the Olympics were overwhelmed with nationalist tensions. Listen to the opening statement of the 1936 Berlin Olympics (the first of the “new” era) and you’ll see the games are influenced by politics. The assassination of Israeli athletes in 1972 and the subsequent failure to mention them at a memorial service eliminates any idea that the Olympics are a spin-free zone. Additionally, the shameful boycotts of the Moscow and L.A. Games in 1980 and 1984 by the United States and the USSR indicate pure athleticism is second banana to political concerns. The title of worst game of all is a tie between the 2002 Salt Lake City games, where Olympic Committee members took bribes, and the 1984 Sarajevo games that happened less than a decade before a civil war and genocide swept the city.
A third fallacy of the Olympics is they are a fair playing field for the best athletes in the world to compete on. In the last decade, every single Olympics involved discovery of illegal substance use. Further, the number of incidents that escaped the oversight bodies, dating back to the 1960s, proves that many Olympic accomplishments are not in the mold of heroic legend narrated by Bob Costas. Additionally, each nation is permitted to train its amateur athletes as it sees fit. This leads to the United States building massive complexes with dorms, trainers and nutritionists in Colorado and Lake Placid and countries like Kenya and Lithuania struggling to provide uniforms for their athletes. Further, participants must register with a nation, eliminating the potential of trans-national teams and leading to those ubiquitous medal charts on the news every night.
Does anyone think that the United States would win as many medals as it does if its athletes were forced to fit their training around subsistence farming and pay their own expenses? As the documentary Pumping Iron showed, Arnold Schwarzenegger could afford better gym facilities than his competition and that helped him win. The same is true of the Olympics, yet NBC’s PR firm has done an excellent job of selling the Olympics as some special event.
The fourth and final problem with the Olympics is their sheer cost. Many host nations spend upwards of one billion to two billion dollars to host the games. This does not include lucrative advertising contracts, the cost of training athletes or the cost for spectators to attend. Considering about 20 percent of Americans can’t find America on a map and many people around the world have never seen a map of the world, one must ask if all this money and hype could be better spent on other things. Further, the 2004 Olympics cost $3 billion and the 2008 games are budgeted at $23 billion! That is more than twice the $10 billion spent worldwide to fund the Tsunami Relief effort. After the Atlanta Olympics, the various committees promised to reduce the level of commercialization, however, every subsequent Olympics has had bigger and better advertising campaigns with fancier and more numerous mascots and toys. The Beijing games in 2008 promise a record five new mascots to plaster over such historic monuments as the Forbidden City, obliterating much of the local flavor in favor of a TV-viewer friendly games.
The Olympics are little more than an excuse for rich nations to show off how well they can train their athletes and an opportunity for savvy marketers to make money at the expense of long term development. It would be far better for each sport to hold their own international championships in existing facilities, without the need for special security and infrastructure developments. The savings from eliminating the Olympics could be directed towards the impoverished nations in Africa and Southeast Asia in order to help those nations develop their economies and national skill set. This would be a far more noble use of funds than to see who can build the biggest stadium or spend the most money on 17 days of security.