Olympic claptrap

THE news that members of the International Olympic Committee have been taking bribes from cities hoping to stage the Olympic Games broke with all the shock that comes when the sun rises in the east. In fact the truly shocking thing is how small the bribes were: less than half a million quid shared among 13 IOC members.

But all the same, it left the president, Juan Antonio Samaranch, with plenty of tortilla on his face, because he has spent the entire 19 years of his presidency flogging the notion of Olympic ideals, Olympic purity, international brotherhood and global goodwill. Governments have always adored this particular form of claptrap. It took Samaranch's singular genius to realise that major international corporations would not only adore it, but would pay vast amounts of money to be associated with it.

That has been the achievement of his presidency: to change the Olympics from a tatty political cliche that was running desperately short of money into a tatty commercial cliche that makes money by the billion.

At the heart of it all lies the Great Olympic Fallacy, which is the equation of sport with virtue. Sport was organised and made part of British education to instil in boys the manly characteristics that were needed at the sharp end of the Empire. Great stress was laid on the virtues of amateurism; sport was only virtuous if you could afford to do it for nothing. Only the middle classes were therefore truly virtuous.

The French saw the international potential of this and set up many of the international sporting federations. Baron Pierre de Coubertin founded the modern Olympic movement, full of belief in sport and world peace. The last century has not been entirely war-free, but mere reality has never had the power to affect a truly powerful piece of claptrap. George Orwell saw through it and, journalist-like, overstated his case. War minus the shooting is a very fair summary of sport, but shooting is a fairly crucial thing for a war to be without.

What, then, is sport? It is a pleasure for those who do it and for those who watch. Every Olympic Games reaches a bigger audience. We watch not because it is virtuous, but because it is fabulous.

I choose my words with care. Sport is a repository of fables and myths, heroes and villains. It is an ongoing epic: and epics are not about virtues any more than they are about gods; they are about humanity.

Sport reveals human beings in all their virtues and their flaws and it does so in the most dramatic fashion possible. The tale of Michelle Smith, the Irish swimmer who won three gold medals and was later done for drugs, is as enthralling as the story of the greatest Olympian of them all, Steve Redgrave, the British oarsman.

The point about Redgrave is not that he is good, but that he is great. The same is true of the Olympic Games themselves. If the newly announced purging of the Olympic stables gets rid of the smoking piles of claptrap that have been stinking the place out for a century and more, then the current traumas are a jolly good thing.

Copyright Spectator Jan 30, 1999
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved