Indeed, because the modern Olympics have come to appeal to all sorts of people – sports fans and un-sports fans alike – the Games bind us in ways that are otherwise absent from this niche society we live in. The Winter Games are great television, the prettiest, but they take place at a serious time of the year and have evolved, essentially, into one momentous question: who will win the ladies’ figure skating? The Summer Olympics, like summer reading and summer movies and summer romances – especially summer romances – have always been less involving, more transitory and (ideally) evanescent. Now that we don’t have to prove our Way of Life by beating the Commies in an artificial medal competition, the Summer Games are even less compelling athletically, easy come, easy go-lightly.
So, are you ready to rumble? Now, don’t cheat, don’t read the caption on the next page. Can you name one swimmer in these, the 1996 Olympics? Just one. And yet, a week from now, as sure as you also can’t tell the difference between the breaststroke and the butterfly, you will be screaming to the whole family, ““Hurry, the 200-meter IM is coming up,’’ and you will be involved with a bunch of barely visible heads bobbing in the water as the clock ticks off in hundredths of seconds toward a thing called a WR that you previously didn’t know existed. ““Oh, she just touched out,’’ you will then say. With authority.
Oh, there are some spoilsports about, some grousing that the Olympics have, in the accepted phrase, ““gotten too commercial.’’ Coca-Cola, the thousand-pound gorilla who sleeps in Atlanta, is the particular punching bag. But, really, nobody much knows how the Olympics operate or how it is they get to Atlanta or Nagano or Sydney or wherever it is that they mysteriously alight every couple of years. They are, in fact, run as a personal fiefdom by one Juan Antonio Samaranch, an old Franco apparatchik. But he’s like the Easter Bunny. As long as Samaranch shows up at the appointed time with the goodies, don’t bother us with detail.
Anyway, all’s fair: Samaranch and all the other old men who constitute The International Olympic Committee got schnookered this year by the Atlanta people who told the IOC members that it wasn’t all that hot there in July. The old boys chose to believe them. Caveat emptor. Remember, the biggest Olympic Game of them all nowadays is getting the Olympics for your city.
Curiously, although these are the fourth Summer Games to be held in the United States, it is only the first time that we actually won them – took them from somebody else’s city. In 1904 St. Louis was handed the third Olympics as part of its World’s Fair. Then, both in the Depression of ‘32 and in ‘84, amid athletic-political turmoil, Los Angeles was the savior, the only city in the world that would take the bloody thing. But against all odds, Atlanta beat out Athens for the centennial honor, and some hard feelings remain. As a consequence – and because of the heat and the Coke – Atlanta will suffer a scrutiny that Los Angeles never did.
But above and beyond all that, there are the athletes. Hand in hand with the commercialism of the show has come the professionalism of the performers. To his credit, Samaranch did rid the Games of much of their shamateurism. If we traded hype for hypocrisy, it was a bargain. But for all the stars swooshed up by Nike since then, there truly remain many of the girls and boys from next door – and they, after all, may yet be the single enduring attraction of the Games.
For all the massiveness and heavy-handedness, for all the artifice, we still sense that deep inside the Olympics, there is something dear to be found. So we watch and learn to care.
