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Why Does Everyone Hate The Beijing Olympics? Part One

Posted April 15, 2008 at 11:00 AM by Michael J. Sedor

Section: Beijing 2008, Beijing News, Doping, Culture/History, Socio-Political, Events, Track & Field, Featured Writers, Michael Sedor

Judge Roy Bean The April 13 Sunday New York Times was a veritable indictment of Beijing 2008 and the Olympics movement. How bad could it have been? The front page upper left hand corner article’s title was ”Witness in Track Doping Case Is Ready to Name Big Names”. Ooof. The Week in Review section included a photo essay of various protest banners that substituted the Olympic rings with handcuffs, nooses, tank wheels, and skulls. Double ooof. The gold medalist in their Olympic beat down was a lead editorial by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Buzz Bissinger entitled ”Faster, Higher, Stronger, No Longer.” The editorial’s conclusion: “There is only one way left to improve the Olympics: to permanently end them”. Ooof, ooof, ooof.

These three articles are emblematic of the trauma, drama, and worldwide negative zeitgeist that has enveloped these Olympic games since the torch relay began a little over two weeks ago. We already hate these games of supposed world unity and brotherhood. Their overarching problems: 1) The athletes; the competitors are cheats. 2) The leaders; the IOC is corrupt and awash in dirty money. 3) The location; China is bad. They are an evil totalitarian government that revels in abuse and torture.

The world, and the New York Times, is collective asking: why won’t these Olympics just go away?

The Times’ lead article “Witness in Track Doping...” focuses on 2008 Olympics problem #1: the athletes. The extensive expose centers around interviews with Angel Guillermo Heredia, the 33-year-old star witness for the federal prosecutors in a lying under oath charge against track coach Trevor Graham. The article acknowledges Heredia’s shady past and general unreliability but, nevertheless, publishes his steroid-use indictments of heretofore innocent athletes. Eight of the 12 athletes he named had thus far avoided performance-enhancing drugs links.

The article follows the alleged Olympic dream-assisting drugs from Mexican pharmacies and labs to the Rio Grande border town of Laredo, Texas where Heredia performed his smuggling deeds to, naturally, the notorious Bay Area Laboratory Co-operation (Balco) where dreams, again allegedly, come true. Heredia, who may yet be charged on perjury or drug trafficking charges by the federal government, weaves a sordid tale of chemical assisting, fraud, $10,000 wire transfers, betrayal, and ambition. This would-be Jose Canseco explains, “I tried for years to protect them and at this point, I’m just doing what is best for me.”

No one reading the Times article is surprised to learn that Heredia’s dirty dozen have won 26 Olympic medals. We’ve been told for years that Olympic athletes are cheats, that their records are always tainted by nasty undetectable human growth hormones or designer steroids that somehow escape the test-tube’s discerning eye. We smugly laugh when athletes who have been caught insist they are innocent or that the tests are wrong or have been tampered with. Conventional wisdom has already told us the truth: you are all guilty. Our quick judgment and intransigent disbelief reminds of another Rio Grande border resident: Judge Roy Bean.

But what if our cynicism is wrong? The track and field records aren’t falling at exponential rates like baseball records. There is no super human running 9.50 100 meter dashes and Michael Johnson’s 10-year-old 200 and 400 records look pretty safe. What events would surely benefit from drug help? Heavy implements like shot put, discus, and hammer. Right? On the men’s side those records are 18, 22, and 22 years-old respectively. Women’s are 21, 20 and 1 but the hammer is a relatively new female event.

Disbelievers would say that drug testing is better now and that is why the records haven’t been broken. This self-defeating circular logic doesn’t make sense. If the drugs are undetectable (how else could Heredia’s sullied eight escape notice) then why wouldn’t they be setting records? The only possible explanation is that the old and now detectable drugs are much more effective than the new undetectable drugs. Somehow that conclusion has become an accepted truth. Facts be damned.

There are many victims here but the one we’re most interested in is the Olympics themselves. Its marquee competitors, the track athletes, have been sullied, disgraced, and judged guilty without trial and without evidence. As a result, the Olympics are without integrity, lacking its necessary moral base, and ripe for abuse.

Of course the athletes are hardly the only ones to blame. Enter the International Olympic Committee and the Chinese government, two entities that aren’t nearly as easy to defend as twenty-something sprinters. Can the IOC’s choice to give Beijing the games be excused? Will that choice sound the death knell for the Olympics as Bissinger desires? In part two of this post I’m going to try to answer those two questions.