Olympic Preview, 2004
by NIH sports correspondent Duff "Twilley" Wilmott
It's that time again! Time for the Olympic Games! Or, as we call them in Canada, the Oh Lympic games! Every four years there's a little extra buzz in the air – the sound of Baron de Coubertin spinning in his grave like an electric drill bit, probably.
Not that I mean to disparage the many fine goals which the modern Oh Lympic Games achieve – goals like promoting the construction industry. Why, if Torontonians hadn't been so shortsighted and had instead got behind their city's Olympic bids, Toronto would now have another giant world-class stadium that no one can come close to filling!
But the Olympic Games have changed over the years. Jim Thorpe was stripped of his Olympic medals because he had once played semi-professional baseball, a sport which was not even part of the Olympic Games at the time. Nowadays Canadian Olympic athletes spend more time whining about how little they get paid than they do training. Olympic gold medals go to professional athletes whose annual salaries for playing their sport are in the millions of dollars. And Jim Thorpe's medals have been restored.
But times change, and the Olympic Games has quite commendably change d with them. Once upon a time we had the naive idea that, while sport provided many benefits, adult human beings had something better to do with their lives than devote them entirely to perfecting their performance in playground games.
Nowadays we have adopted the naive ideas of modern corporate management, according to which life is all about the bottom line – why would anyone devote their lives to the effort now required to qualify for the Olympic Games, let alone win a medal, if they were not rewarded handsomely? Which would be a good question, except that the idea of devoting one's life to sport is a consequence of increases in the monetary rewards for success in sport. The money did not increase because the effort required to compete in the Olympics increased, the effort increased because the money increased.
As for adults having better things to do than participate in playground games, we all seem to have come to an agreement over the last 20 years or so that none of us need ever become adult at all (as explained in another article). No longer need our self-actualization be impeded by neurotic desires to lead productive lives which contribute to the well-being of society! Nowadays we know that the key to self-actualization and self-esteem is found in an obsessive and exclusive concentration on…the self! What could be more obvious? Why abandon the interests of our childhood to devote ourselves to questionable pursuits like science or the arts when you can make more money and get more respect and get laid a lot more often by succeeding in the same events that your elementary school used to hold at its annual field day?
No, we have discovered the key to happiness. We avoid adulthood. We get married less often, and when we do we get married later and stay married for less time. More and more we pay no attention to politics and refuse to vote. We don't have time for boring trips like democracy. That's one of those 60s things that those comical flea-ridden hippies believed in.
Wait – this is billed as a preview, isn't it? Okay, what you're going to see over the next few weeks is an obsession with adults playing playground games. Plus water polo, a sport which appears on television only once every four years, during the Oh Lympics. You're going to see people idolized for winning a hunk of metal on a ribbon. I say a hunk of metal because in Canada you don't even have to win a gold one to be idolized.
And of course we Canadians will get to be entertained by the crack CBC Oh Lympic television crew. Let's face it, those guys are comic geniuses. Whoever the fellow is who does that Brian Williams character is one of the great comedians of our time. His ability to declaim the most banal and unfounded opinions as if he was speaking ex cathedra on matters of faith and morals (which, I suppose, these days the matters he talks about are) and to work in a little pompous indignation on top is truly sidesplitting. And many of us admire his shtick of continually having to be telling us what the time is.
And for a few weeks we Canadians will be diverted by panicked demands, inspired by the traditional Canadian Oh Lympic cluelessness, for an increase in government subsidies for "sport" (without, of course, raising taxes or reducing other services); by an occasional glimpse at the American coverage where the commentators' typical hyperbole will be going into overdrive in an effort to compensate for the American team's disappointing failure at the big meet in Iraq; and by the Cuban women's volleyball team.
And of course we'll be making a lot of money out of the games, if we're pharmaceutical salespeople.
Posted August 11, 2004Olympic Preview, 2004 © John FitzGerald, 2004
