Responses to “Reform the Olympics: Pick a Spot and Stick With It”

Give up, the “Games” are gone beyond repair, if they ever truly were games in the first place, given there martial connotations. The ‘Games’ recent prominence owes as much to politics as it does to sport. Inextricably bound up in the Cold War mentality they bizarrely became an index of Western superiority (or misgivings about such) vis-a-vis the old Soviet system. This crude nationalism has carried over somewhat in the post-Soviet era but it’s required an extra measure of PR spin and commercial enterprise to fill the void lefy by the titanic symbolic struggle of the West vs. the “commies” as played out in the puffed up pagentry of the Olympics. War by other means, the old martial signifiers in modern guise. Perhaps China can fill that void to create a new Us vs. Them paradigm, even if they would rather not. The modern Olympics were never very popular in smaller countries that had only token representation. They have mainly been hyped up in rich nations were the advertising revenues are most lucrative and the participation greatest. The TV rights for America are more costly than for all of South America and Africa put together. Amusingly, Americans tend to treat the Olympics as a ‘team’ sport, totaling up the number of medals collected to see if we “won”. The “tawdry boosterism of the modern Games” is exactly what has made them so popular in the U.S. and a few other rich countries. Ideally, in a nation of philosophers, perhaps it would be different. But don’t expect the “Games” to change much until the society does.