Why Does Everyone Hate The Beijing Olympics? Part Two

Posted May 1, 2008 at 01:07 PM by Michael J. Sedor

Section: Beijing 2008, Doping, Culture/History, Human Interest, Socio-Political, Events, Track & Field, Featured Writers, Michael Sedor, Special Features, Columns/Blogs

Now if you thought the Sunday New York Times’ front page article “Witness in Track Doping Case Is Ready to Name Big Names” (detailed in Part 1) skewered the Beijing Games then you didn’t open the Week in Review section.  While the “Witness…” article examined the cheating athletes, the Week in Review’s photo essay and guest editorial Faster, Higher, Stronger, No Longer from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Buzz Bissinger attacked the organizers, China’s politics, and the Olympic movement. The Times’ damning conclusions of Beijing 2008 do not stray from the consensus opinion of the Western world and beg the question: Why does everyone hate these Olympic Games?  A look at the “Rings of Dissent” photo essay, shots taken at Olympic torch relay protests, reveals a rich cast of familiar answers – China’s occupation of Tibet and East Turkestan, China’s role in the Darfur genocide, other Chinese domestic human rights violations – that are represented via re-imaginations of the Olympic rings. A young pro-Turkistan supporter redesigns the rings as nooses. Tibetan protest placards show the rings leaking blood, taking the form of bullet holes, and becoming skulls. The Olympic rings become handcuffs in one and form the wheels of the 1989 Tiananmen Square tank in another.

Beijing 2008’s re-labeling as a Blood Olympics, a Genocide Olympics, a Repression Olympics, or a Human Rights Olympics is quickly becoming a reality. China has opened its skeleton-filled closet and now faces the outraged opinions of a judgmental world. The protesters’ signs are those judgments.

Anger over the Tibetan occupation and the genocide in Darfur is not new but the Olympic torch relay has given reason for the world to refocus. This is surely a good result and would not have happened without the Beijing Games. These horrors would have been placed far from the world’s priority list. But now we care and we must hope that China abandons its defiant stance and addresses the world’s concerns.

Nevertheless when the IOC awarded Beijing the games neither they nor the Chinese government hoped to spotlight Chinese human rights violations. They wanted to showcase the world’s fastest growing industrial nation, a place where countless freeways are built with Eisenhower’s fervor, a country that’s home to most of the world’s construction cranes, a place that we must accept as a part of our global community. Because of the Olympics it is a place that we now realize is there. That can’t be a bad thing.

Buzz Bissinger’s article is so wrapped in idealism that it sees no good at all. He quixotically wishes that the Olympics were still stuck in the pre-modern era, in a time of innocence where television money and global politics didn’t interfere with the virtue of sport. A time when the aristocratic Victorian-era values of Olympics founder Pierre de Coubertin still reigned, a time of amateurs, a time of purity, a time of royalty, a time of exploitation.

Bissinger imagines that if de Coubertin saw today’s Olympics filled with its oceans of corruption, strife, dirty money, and kowtowing to evil regimes he would want his games disbanded. In turn, it only stands to reason that the Olympics should be no more. He follows the Olympics year-by-year from 1968 on giving an example of how the Games betrayed de Coubertin.

Bissinger himself would probably be alarmed if he had attended de Coubertin’s first Olympics in 1896. He would be shocked at the similar politicization. The Greek royal family would have been sitting at the finish line promoting their spendthrift royalist agenda, one at odds with the recently deceased former Prime Minister Charilaos Trikoupis who felt the country couldn’t afford the price tag of the new Olympics.

Ironically, Bissinger cites the Greek government’s profligate spending – $12 billion on the Athens Games – as his 2004 reason on why the Olympics must end.  Bissinger’s most acclaimed work, 1990’s Friday Night Lights took the same lost innocence look at high school football indicting the corrupt system and the economic disparity of a west Texas town.

Friday Night Lights, however, doesn’t call for the abolishment of high school football partly because it provides hopes, dreams, and opportunities for its young participants like its protagonist Brian Chavez who parlayed sports into admission into Harvard and gives solace and meaning to the lives of Odessa, Texas residents.

In his curt, dismissive New York Times editorial Bissinger forgets that the Olympic games provide similar hope, dreams, opportunities, solace and meaning for athletes and nations the world over.  There are thousands of athletes like Afghani miler Mahboba Ahdyar, Irani high jumper Zahra Nabizadeh, and Palestinian runner Nader Masri. Athletes with no chance to win in Beijing but who are shining examples of de Coubertin’s famed Olympics credo:  “The most important part of the Olympics is not to win but to participate, just as the important thing in life is not the victory but the battle. It is not to have conquered but to have fought well.”

We think de Coubertin would love what his Olympics have become.