The Olympic Spirit

Holmes sent along this article a couple of days back. This story of Somali Olympians, who come from arguably the least stable state on the globe, reveals in many ways why a hyper-nationalist approach to the Olympics in which one's own country's performances are all that matter is silly and shortsighted. The Olympics are as much about stories such as this one as about the medal counts and the world records.

London 2012

Perhaps sounding something of a note of contrarianism, Anne Applebaum argues in The Washington Post that compared to the Beijing Olympic games, those in London "will be a lot less sinister, a lot less damaging and a lot more fun." (She forgets to mention: Buttloads more expensive to attend.)

On Medal Counts and Nationalism

I cannot get myself too worked up over the Olympic medal counts for a host of reasons. For one, as Eduardo Porter reminds us at The New York Times, Olympic dominance tends to go to the richest countries and the most autocratic ones. It would have been stunning had any countries other than the United States and China dominated the medal count, especially with China as the host country. But the Olympics are also about more than bean counting which teams were most successful. National pride and glory manifests itself throughout the games -- and it is both churlish and wrongheaded simply to dismiss this as boorish patriotism, given that some of the most nationalistic furor comes from smaller countries -- while at the same time the Olympics are supposed to transcend that sort of nationalism.

I do not always even support the American athletes. In sports in which Americans do not traditionally compete, I could not care less. In events when there is a serious underdog and where a victory by an athlete from a smaller country might bring some glory to that country, I'll find myself rooting for the underdog. I also root for African athletes, which should come as no surprise. I want the Americans to dominate certain sports, of course, and all things being equal I am likely to support the American team absent the treacly overcoming odds story from an international athlete or the presence of an African athlete I prefer. But at the end of the day, the Olympics are about the gathering, the experience, the competition.

The reality is that we all know who won these Olympics, for good or for ill. The United States won the overall medal count by virtue of racking up bronzes and silvers. But the Chinese won the most golds, and if we are tallying up winners, it seems bizarre to presuppose that a gold is not worth any more than the others. But in the end none of this matters. The Chinese put on a great Olympics, albeit by destroying any of the promises they made about openness in the process.

Only four years to London (and less than two to Vancouver)!

Olympics and World Records

The New York Times has a fascinating interactive chart progressing the world records set at the Olympic games in events across several sports. The games are wrapping up. I'll have moe to say, but I'm still a bit taken aback by the disjunction between the unquestionably fantastic product the Chinese put forward and the willingness of NBC and other observers to allow that to blind us utterly to some of China's more nefarious actions. The emphasis should be on the games, but the disproportionate nature of that focus here is somewhat disquieting.

Rogge's Bizarre Rant

Courtesy of longtime reader and dcat friend Donnie Baseball comes this article from Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports. It seems that Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympics Committee has gone after ubersprinter Usain Bolt for his celebratons at the end of some of his races in these Olympics. Suffice it to say that Rogge is a fatuous gasbag. We could spend days explaining why, but here is a taste from Wetzel's column:

Jacques Rogge is so bought, so compromised, the president of the IOC doesn’t have the courage to criticize China for telling a decade of lies to land itself these Olympic Games.

All the promises made to get these Games — on Tibet, Darfur, pollution, worker safety, freedom of expression, dissident rights — turned out to be phony, perhaps as phony as the Chinese gymnasts’ birthdates Rogge was way too slow to investigate.

One of the most powerful men in sports turned the world away from his complicity. Instead, he has flexed his muscles by unloading on a powerless sprinter from a small island nation.

Rogge’s ripping of Usain Bolt’s supposed showboating in two of the most electrifying gold-medal performances of these Games has to be one of the most ill-timed and gutless acts in the modern history of the Olympics.

[There's more (I hope this large excerpt does not violate fair usage, but the column is pretty spot on):]

Oh, this is richer than those bribes and kickbacks the IOC got caught taking.

All the powerful nations — including the United States — have carte blanche at the Games. They can pout and preen, cheat, throw bean balls, file wild complaints, break promises that got them a host bid, whatever they want. They can take turns slapping Rogge and his cronies around like rag dolls as long as the dinner with a good wine list gets paid.

A single individual sprinter? Even if you don’t like his manner, that’s whom Rogge deems it necessary to attack, to issue a worldwide condemnation?

“I understand the joy,” Rogge said. “He might have interpreted that in another way, but the way it was perceived was ‘catch me if you can.’ You don’t do that. But he’ll learn. He’s still a young man.”

Perceived by whom? Old fat cats making billions of Olympic dollars on the backs of athletes like Bolt for a century now? They get to define this? They get to lecture about learning?

Bolt is everything the Olympics are supposed to be about. He isn’t the product of some rich country, some elaborate training program that churns out gold medals by any means necessary.

He’s a breath of fresh air, a guy who came out of nowhere to enrapture the world with his athletic performance and colorful personality. This is no dead-eye product of some massive machine.

He was himself, and the world loved him for it.

On his own force of will, Bolt has become the break-out star of these Games. He saved the post-Michael Phelps Olympics. It wasn’t so much his world-record times, but the flair, the fun.

No one at the track had a problem with this guy; they understood he is everything the sport needs to recover from an era of extreme doping. The Lightning Bolt made people care about track again, something that seemed impossible two weeks ago.

“I don’t feel like he’s being disrespectful,” American Shawn Crawford told the Associated Press. “He deserves to dance.”

Apparently, Rogge would prefer 12-year-old gymnasts too frightened to crack a smile.

It got better when, in the same press conference, he pretended to forget all the lies China told him to get this bid, all the troubles, all the challenges, and praised the host nation. Yes, these have been an exceptionally well-run Games from a tactical standpoint, and the Chinese people have displayed otherworldly kindness.

None of which denies the promises broken, the innocent jailed, the freedoms denied — the kind of issues someone with Jacques Rogge’s standing should be talking about.

He has no spine for that. Not for China. Not for any big country. He had to criticize someone, he had to make headlines, he had to show he was a tough guy. So who better than someone from somewhere that can’t ever touch him back?

Yes, Usain Bolt is the problem of the Olympics. He’s the embarrassment. He’s the one who needs to learn.

Sure, Jacques, sure.

As Donnie Baseball sums it up: "It reminds me of what I really don’t like about the Olympics. All the fun seems to have been sucked right out of the quadrennial spectacle."

The 100 Meter Dash

Marcus Hayes of the Philadelphia Daily News sums up a good deal of what I feel about Usain Bolt's incredible race for history vis a vis Michael Phelps -- not that it is a zero-sum game -- in this column. A sample:

Everybody runs.
Not everybody swims.

It's that simple.

You marvel at Michael Phelps, Mr. Olympics 2008, Mr. Olympics for all time.

You identify with Usain Bolt, the Fastest Man Ever.

Phelps, an American, obliterated records in five solo swims here. His eight gold medals, a probability achieved, made him a safe and simple face with which to brand these Games, the new Mark Spitz. His 14 career golds vaporized the old mark by five.

But not everybody swims. Certainly, not everybody swims well, and virtually nobody swims more than one stroke, maybe two.

But everybody runs.

Bolt, a Jamaican, on Saturday morning ran the most significant race in Olympic history.

He lowered the 100-meter world record he unexpectedly set in May by 0.03 seconds.

Everybody has run. You start when you're about a year old. Eventually, everybody runs 100 yards or meters: in gym class, training for some sport, from parents or the boogeyman.

Because everybody runs, the case can quite easily be made that Usain Bolt categorically won the singular sporting event, running faster than anyone else ever has (without the aid of wind), that every other person on earth with the physical capability has tried. He won the most competitive sporting endeavor there is. He ran the single event that is elemental to nearly all (land-based) sports.

I'm reminded again of a Farleyism I am sure I have shared with you in the past. Dick Farley was the college football hall of fame football coach at Williams. Before he took the head gridiron job, he was the Williams head track coach, and after that he became an assistant with the team, a position he still holds. Farley was legendary for his witticisms, most notably for his bon mots, his "Farleyisms" (so dubbed by us, not by him). My favorite probably was his constant rejoinder to us, and especially to his football players, "you're only here because there is no division 4." One time at a meet at UMass he was coaching me up between triple jumps. The 5000 meter runners were huffing their way through that race and he simply asked me, rhetorically of course, "would any of these guys be doing this if they could run the hundred?" That sums it up in a nutshell.

Bolt From the Blue

It has been buried by the Micheal Phelps juggernaut, but the unfortunate time lag between Beijing and the US, and by dumb programming decisions by NBC, but for all of Phelps' dominance, the single most awesome moment athletically in this Olympics has been Jamaican Usain Bolt's stunning, otherworldly victory in the 100 meter dash. Bolt crushed his own world record, lowering it from 9.72 seconds to 9.69. But more impressive than that is how Bolt did it -- and how he emerged this year.

Bolt, a precocious talent in the 200 pretty much had to beg his coach to be allowed to run the 100. This year is his first year as a competitive 100 meter runner at the world class level, which is to say that Bolt has probably not run the 100 in ten meets. He is 6' 5", which is massive for the dash, and event traditionally dominated by muscular, stocky guys built like NFL running backs. In the race Bolt got out to what was for him a decent start. At his height, and with his inexperience, the blocks are the most precarious moment of the race for Bolt. But by 30 meters he race was over. By 60 the race was a laugher. And by 80 meters Bolt, in the Olympic Finals, was celebrating, posing, igh stepping, and decelerating. And yet he still ran the premier distance in track and field, indeed the gold standard for speed in any sporting context, faster than anyone else had ever run it. Not so long ago I remember the world record in the 100 being Jim Hines' 9.95, a mark that stood from 1968 to 1963 and I remember when that mark stood at 9.93 for some time, from 1983, when Calvin Smith set the mark until Carl Lewis (my vote getter for greatest Olympian ever, by the way) set the clean record (following the ignominy of Ben Johnson) of 9.92. (Here is the progression of the record.) Today we take a sub-10 second hundred for granted, forgetting how ridiculously fast such a race is.

We have entered a new realm in the 100, and perhaps in the 200 if that really is Bolt's better event. Bolt ran a 9.5-something race the other day but the joyousness of winning Olympic gold took over. Michael Phelps' eight golds is awesome, and his world records are undeniable. But the worth of swimming world records seems to have undergone a devaluation in recent months. But Usain Bolt's world record is the single greatest one-event performance in this Olympics, and while not Bob Beamonesque, represents one of the greatest single accomplishments in the history of the Olympics.

Beachward Ho!

We are off to a couple of days at the beach near Corpus Christi. I'll return to San Antonio hopelessly sunburned Sunday night and will be back in West Texas Monday evening. I should be back to blogging Tuesday, by which point we will have seen one of the greatest 100 meter dash finals ever, and Michael Phelps will have earned his eight golds and will undoubtedly be shoulders deep in gaggles of nubile Olympic flesh. (Well, what the hell else would you expect him to do? Sightsee?)

Bob Blogging Beijing

Bob Ryan is in Beijing and is covering his ninth Olympics. He is providing insightful observations and commentary at his blog for The Boston Globe.

Olympic Observations

I have been obsessively following the Olympics. Many of you, I'm sure, have as well. The Olympics, like any sporting event (and certainly like politics) is susceptible to the creation of narratives. The first week of these games have had one major narrative: Michael Phelps as swimming God. The usual series of smaller narratives have also emerged: Gymnastics, natch, and the "Redeem Team" (Ugh on that neologism, by the way). Smaller sports struggle for their props, though they get more attention now than they will for the next four years, until the 2012 games in London.

I have always been interested in these smaller sports, though in some ways I am ambivalent about them. Let me express this ambivalence by way of anecdote. When I was in high school there was a guy a couple of years ahead of me who had grown up in the next town over but came to NHS for High School, and he was one of the best ski jumpers in America. As a result, he never set foot on the Newport ski team, and spent huge portions of his year in Lake Placid. Because of the change that caused the winter Olympics to stagger (so that there would be either a summer or a Winter Olympics every two years) there were two Winter Olympics in a two year span in 1992 and 1994, and as a result this guy was able to participate in three Olympics, 1992, 1994, and 1998. In a small town -- in any town, really -- this is an awesome accomplishment.

One day one of my teachers, a former college basketball player and an assistant football coach, as well as hands-down the most respected teacher in the school (debunking the bad-teacher-as-coach meme) said in a conversation about sports: well, x is obviously the greatest athlete ever to come from Newport. And in terms of accomplishment the argument was a tough one to dispute. And I did not begrudge this guy his stardom -- while he never even came close to medalling (American ski jumping is, let's just say, not so good) he was also no Eddie the Eagle. He was a fantastic American ski jumper and a legitimate member of the tail end of the world class, which is to say, he was world class.

At the same time, a little perspective is in order. I was a member of the ski team in high school for my 8th grade, freshman, sophomore, and junior years, until I became good enough at track to be a legitimate contender in my events at the state and New England level and decided to pursue indoor track as a solo competitor, since NHS did not have an indoor track team. My high school had very little in terms of material comforts, but as a freak of circumstances, we did have the best 30-meter ski jump in the state, a practice jump from the 1932 Lake Placid winter games, and thus in years when there was enough natural snowfall (and when insurance liability was covered -- which means not all that often) we had a ski jumping team and hosted the state meet. I competed on that team in one of the very few states to have high school ski jumping. And in the one year I could do so, I was middling in the most literal sense -- I finished in the middle of the pack in the state meet out of about 50 competitors. There are approximately 500-600 ski jumpers in the United States in any given year. I was one of those (and my high school team had more than 1% of the nation's whole), and I was not one of the very, very worst. So being a United States representative for the Olympic ski jumping team is impressive, but you are competing against a pretty small pool. I would be willing to bet that there are more long jumpers in New Hampshire and Vermont, where a huge swath of the US ski jumping team is drawn from, than there are ski jumpers in the United States. And there are no ski jumpers in the states that otherwise tend to produce more world class athletes than New Hampshire. Take that for what it's worth. I take it as an indication that while any Olympian is impressive, we are entering Animal Farm territory in the sense that some Olympians are more impressive than others.

On to observations about some of the specific events:

Swimming: The swimming competition has been riveting. I'm not too worried about the effects of the new swimsuit that has changed the face of the sport. This is not akin to performance enhancing drugs, the use of which is not only banned in the Olympics, but in most cases is illegal in most countries in the world. And the swimming suits pose no health hazard to their users, which means that no one has to engage in a moral or ethical or health debate as to whether to use them. That said, the world records are falling at such a rate that it does cheapen the value of world records in the sport even though it does not invalidate those records. I have no doubt that today's swimmers are better than those in the past, with superior physical skills, better and smarter training, and better facilities and, yes, suits. The competition is the thing, and the competition, even the non-Phelps competition, has been fun to watch. And swimming has enough parallels with track that I think I get not only the basics (which are hardly tough to grasp) but the scope and scale of the accomplishments and also the nature of the competition -- the splits, the training, the idea of peaking, the between-events preparation and so forth. Track and swimming may not be the same language, but they are mutually intelligible to enough of a degree to make conversation viable. Swimming is Portuguese to track's Spanish, if you will.

As for Phelps, I want to first say that I am fully on board this bandwagon. What he is doing is awesome. He is making a case, I think he has made the case, for being the greatest swimmer of all time, even if he does not win another gold. But let's slow the talk about Phelps necessarily being the greatest Olympian of all time. He is lucky and talented enough to compete in a sport where eight medals is part of the realm of possibility. This is not the case for a sport such as track, where competing in four events is itself an impressive accomplishment. Look how many ways there are to go 100 meters in swimming. Recall, meanwhile, 1996, when Michael Johnson pulled off the until-then unheard of 200-400 double. Track has more prelims, it takes longer to recover, and I would be willing to press the case that track is substantially more competitive than swimming in terms of the number of people you have to beat. This is not to say that swimming is akin to ski jumping. But I would also argue that a sport that pretty much is not competitive in sub-Saharan Africa with the exception of white enclaves in South Africa (and that in general is a sport of white privilege and affluence wherever contested) does not compare with track. Everyone has run the 100 meters. Even among people who swim a lot, very few have actually swum a 100-meter breaststroke or butterfly or even backstroke never mind done so for time.

And so when this conversation about the greatest Olympian happens, consider a Carl Lewis, who won gold medals in four Olympics in events that are far more globally competitive than the swimming events. I would be willing to bet that there are more 100-meter runners and long jumpers in the state of Texas than there are swimmers in any two of Phelps' events in the United States. And there are almost inarguably more people doing those events in the United States from the high school level on up than there are people doing all of Phelps' events combined across the globe. For these reasons, Lewis gets my vote for greatest Olympian, though others deserve a place in the conversation as well. (Thunderstick made a couple of great points to me the other day: First, Lewis winning the 100, 200, 4x100 and long jump golds in 1984 would be like Phelps winning the 100, 200 and 4x100 freestyle and then winning one of the diving competitions as well. He also argued that the various strokes for swimmers is like having running forward, backward, sideways, and skipping being seperate events at every distance in track.) And let's keep in mind that there are lots of athletes for whom more than one or perhaps two events would simply be impossible. Al Oerter won four gold medals in four consecutive Olympics in the discus. At that level there is not a lot of crossover even with the shot or the hammer throw. And what of boxers? Members of team sports?

So Phelps has been awesome in a sport most of us appreciate. And he deserves a place in the conversation of all-time greats, in and of itself an almost unfathomably awesome accomplishment. But let's not simply equate winning the most medals with being the best Olympian of all time, even if it certainly helps to bolster his case.

Gymnastics: Now let me bitch about everyone's favorite pixies, the gymnasts. I love sports, so I find myself willing to watch as the competitions get close simply because the language of sport is pretty universal. I watched some of both the women's and men's team competitions the last two nights. I was marginally interested. But here are two gripes:

Judged sports lose serious legitimacy points in my mind. When someone decides who wins rather than the competitors making those decisions, it tends to invalidate the exercise. (I exempt sports where without the default mechanism of judging people would be beaten to death. And Olympic boxing judging is such that I hardly see it as more legit than gymnastics in most cases anyhow.)

The second issue, which effects the women's competition, is that I have a hard time taking any sport seriously in which chldren are considered to have the advantage over adults and in which people lie about their age not to get an advantage of precociousness and thus opportunity down the road, as we see with lots of athletes in lots of sports globally, but rather because being young gives them a serious advantage while they are kids. Any sport where being 20 is a disadvantage because 20 is considered old is a dubious sport in my mind. Sports are about young people excelling, but in most realms that means young adults at their physical peak. Even granting the differing rates of physical maturity that makes many women tend to peak athletically at younger ages, women's gymnastics is a freak show outlier. W
in the end, women's gymnastics is the favorite sport of people who don't like sports (its winter corrollary is, of course, figure skating).

Basketball: I cannot get all that enthused about the Redeem Team. I tend to prefer Olympic sports in which the Olympics represents the pinnacle of that sport -- your track and field, your swimming, your ping pong (I assume). And I have a hard time getting too excited about a sport that we have historically dominated to the point where a bronze medal is not only a disappointent, but also a sign of utter failure. I hope the Americans win, I guess. But I am having a difficult time mustering up too much enthusiasm for the games the way that I know the Thunderstick is (though he is as concerned with how Coach K's role as coach will effect Duke basketball. The Olympic spirit: catch it!)

But enough griping. I think there is a badmnton final on tonight, and probably some kayaking. USA! USA! USA!

Let the Games Begin

I love the Summer Olympics. My track and field background certainly plays a role in my devotion to the quadrennial games, as this is the one time every four years when the jumpers and throwers and runners take center stage. NBC is planning about a billion hours of coverage, and I plan to watch a million of those hours over the next fortnight or so.

One curiousity that even casual viewers will have is how NBC and its several component stations will address the China question. Will NBC remain largely mum, making the fatuous (and demonstrably false) claim that politics have no place in the Olympics? Will any athletes use the medal stand, starting blocks, or any other platform to speak out against China's human rights abuses? Will China shoot itself in the foot by proving its critics' point?

And then there is the much-discussed issue of air quality. Everything you have heard is true. The air is nasty in China. When I was in Beijing a couple of years ago the smog was ubiquitous. On my last day, however, a mucous-thick yellow haze draped the city so that on the way to the airport early in the morning visibility was near impossible. Barring great luck, expect this environmental worry to be a legitimate question, especially when outdoor endurance events are in play.

My guess is that the main theme we'll see the most over the next couple of weeks will involve that precarious line between cultural exploration and cultural streotype. There will be myriad stories and images exploiting the differences between China and the West that will inevitably hint at the idea of ther inscrutable Chinese. And this is understandable -- China is very different from what most of us know. But how this is handled will be telling. There will be very real transportation and language issues for athlete and spectator alike. And China is fascinating. But this sort of endeavor is fraught with landmines. The line between caricature and picture is finer than most think.

Here are a few links that caught my eye this morning: Bob Ryan's column in The Boston Globe is, as should be expected, fine. The New York Times has a blog, Rings, covering all things Olympics (and here is an interesting interview on odd Olympic events with NYT sports magazine Play's John Tayman). The Washington Post scours its archives and samples excerpts from more than a century of opinions on the Olympics. The Council on Foreign Relations spotlights how the Games are part of a larger plan to augment China's peculiar brand of authoritarian capitalism. Here is an article from South Africa's Mail & Guardian discussing the "spectacle and controversy" that will be these games.

Enjoy the Games, USA! USA! Etc.

To Go or Not To Go: The Olympic Dilemma

There are no easy solutions to the dilemma of what to do about the Olympics in Beijing. The solution, of course, would be not to award the Olympics to totalitarian states in the first place, but that toothpaste has long since been squeezed and is not going back in the tube. And ending the Olympics hardly seems like a likely or even viable possibility. None of the options that remain are ideal.

Those who argue that the Olympics is no place for politics have no conception that the Olympics have always been politicized if not political. Nearly every Olympics since at least 1936 has been fraught with politics, whether overt or covert. Wishing something does not make it so, and this includes the dream of an Olympics free of the dirty realities of politics. And the irony, of course, is that those who most would screech about not attending the Olympics are those who would also screech about meeting face to face or otherwise engaging with dictators or dictatorships.

I am torn. We don't want to reward China's noxious human rights record, and there is no doubting that any country that attends the Beijing games will be rewarding China in publicity, in tourism, and in legitimacy. One can argue that the Olympics are not the place to make this stand, and I respect that, but no one can seriously pretend that China does not benefit in myriad ways from hosting these games. The country will put its best face forward, and most observers will not know the difference because they will be steered clear of the hutongs, local dissent will have long since been crushed and most anything that does not re-enforce the image China wants to portray will be whitewashed and censored, and once the games actually commence, international protest will resemble an echo chamber. On the home front, any debate about China will mostly be about scoring points and using the issue as a political cudgel rather than constructing an ideal policy.

Perhaps it is the athlete in me that realizes too that while they are a tiny constituency, the athletes for whom Beijing represents the culmination of a dream deserve consideration. For better or for worse, the Olympics are the apex of global athletic competition for the majority (or at least a huge plurality) of athletes in the majority of sports. I hate the idea of taking away one of these opportunities from them that comes only every four years. Compared to the geopolitical questions involved this may be small beer, silly even, but once a jock, always a jock.

One hope I have is that the media will not sanitize the context in which the games will be played and thus will make the best of the situation. the problem with this is that the majority of media members sent to Beijing will be sportswriters whose mandate is not politics, and whose views most of us do not, in the majority of cases, care about. Jay Mariotti, as just one example among many, is a dullard when it comes to his bailiwick of sports. Do you really want his take on global politics? Nonetheless, if NBC and the news networks keep their eye on what China is and what it is not, which is to say, if they are willing to peel away the veneer that China will skillfully present, perhaps daylight really will prove to be the best disinfectant.

The China Conundrum

So, what to do about China and the Olympics?

It is facile and ahistorical to assert that the Olympics, or sports in general, should be kept separate from politics. The Olympics are an orgy of nationalistic fervor and political platforms and always have been.

Hell, the Cold War gave the Olympics a huge amount of their cache. I always found it ironic that conservatives blasted Jimmy Carter for choosing not to send the American teams to the 1980 games in Moscow given that Carter was making the decision not to give the Russians the platform that the Olympics offered. It may not have been a great decision politically, and it may not have had the desired effect, but the ardent self-avowed anti-Communists ought to have embraced the decision. But most ardent anti-Communism was always more of a cudgel with which to batter the domestic opposition than it was anything else anyway.

But that brings us back to China, which has a record of human rights violations second-to-none on the globe and which actively countenances genocide in Darfur. SL Price called out the International Olympic Committee in a recent issue of Sports Illustrated, and rightfully so. But what is the responsibility of the United States? Are we not fueling China's despotism, albeit despotism with a gleaming capitalist facade, by sending our teams to compete and our media to cover those competitions? The die was cast as soon as the IOC granted Beijing the Games. Surely it is not too much to ask that in the future we don't grant the games to totalitarian countries. Is it?