They’re run by an all-powerful international committee, and whatever luckless city hosts the games becomes a police state for the duration. So why exactly is anyone upset that the Olympics are coming to China?
The Onion captures the hysteria:
The Beijing Olympics: Are They A Trap?
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on Friday, August 1st, 2008 at 12:28 am and is filed under Diversions.
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August 9th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
I think the anti-Olympic people are the ones who have gone ‘over the top’. Admittedly the IOC and the whole ‘mythology of the Olympics’ invites criticism, it won’t bring about world peace, save the planet and cure cancer. But it is the world’s best sports carnival bar none.
And it is a success. There are numerous competitors, private and public, in this marketplace, from the Commonwealth Games to Ted Turner’s Goodwill Games. All of the competitors would love to have the stature and popularity of the Olympics, but they come no where near it. The Olympics is a success in it’s marketplace and it has not got there through any grant of monopoly privilege. The Olympics is a competitive success. Like Coca Cola or the church, there are plenty of critics, but the critics are free to organise their own games by their own rules if they want. Good luck but I am sure no one would want to watch them.
Sure in our age of big government, too much public money goes into staging the Games but in recent years most host cities have been relying more on private sources. Were there any anarcho-capitalist cities on the planet I am sure they might consider bidding for a Games too.
The IOC itself only owns the name, the logo and ability to award the event to rival cities that compete for the privilege of hosting the Games. Most of the revenue for the Games comes from TV rights sales. The IOC was based on the model of Britain’s AAA. The Amateur Athletics Association. A gentlemen’s club that awarded membership only to those it invited. Internally it’s no democracy. That model and their Switzerland HQ location have given them the organisational model to outlive the League of Nations and two and a half world wars. Their oligarchic model means they can recruit select members from the power elite of every nation onto their committee.
The critics are right when they say there are plenty of corrupt old time servers on the IOC. But every corporate board and government panel has examples of similar denizens too. The IOC’s “AAA” model has worked. It is hard to believe that if the Olympics were say owned by a UN committee, say an “International Sports Organisation” or run by UNESCO, that the Olympics would be half as good.
There are numerous ‘issues’ in sport. Funding, drugs etc. I don’t agree with public funding for sport. Drugs? Well the Olympic organisers do what they can. If prisoners in jail can source narcotics I don’t think sports officials can provide an airtight system of control. Drugs in sport are a ‘cancer’ but they aren’t the end of the world. In the history of sports, different games and disciplines have waxed and waned in their public popularity. Often drug or gambling scandals lead to their loss of public confidence, the result a new sport replaces the old in public popularity. These crises are a disaster for one sport, not sport per se. We should see it as a competitive process.
When the Olympics were founded, it’s patrons had imbibed the late 19th century liberal ideals that universal peace was around the corner. This faith has certainly been misplaced but I don’t think it’s one Tory Anarchists can be too critical of.
August 11th, 2008 at 1:17 am
You make a good case, Tim. I don’t begrudge China, or the athletes. But the media circus puts me in a sour mood every time.