Better alternative to Olympics?

Press, 18 May 1984, Page 12

Better alternative to Olympics?

From ‘The Economist,’ London

The Russians are staying away from the summer Olympics because it is not in their interest that these should be a success — watched by more than one billion worldwide televiewers gawking into a rich Los Angeles, possibly with some sports at last sufficiently medically monitored to reveal how many East European athletes are stuffed to the eyeballs on drugs, and with impresarios waiting with cheque books to lure into rich exile some of their golden youth who would win fame at the games. Before lamenting that this boycott could kill the modern Olympics, recognise what they are. The Olympics are the once-in-four-years showplace of 20 to 30 sports which have deteriorated from artistocratic to bureaucratic control. In this television age showcase sports are now usually much better run by the sorts of entrepreneurial arrangers who have turned the best young golfers and tennis-players into healthy millionaires. The organisers in Los Angeles had looked like bringing these 1984 games into small profit. Through the previous decade it had been

assumed that the deadweight of Olympic bureaucracy meant the games could be staged only in cities, like Montreal and Moscow, willing to spend taxpayers' money like water. The Russians prefer that. Many of the hangers-on to the International Olympic Committee (1.0. C. and to the more than 150 National Olympic Committees, and to the 20 to 30 individual sports federations attached to the average national committee, are appearing on worldwide television tc call this previous spending ol taxpayers’ billions on themselves the true embodiment of the Olympic ideal, and to castigate the “crudely overcommercial” Americans for curbing it. They misunderstand what the Olympics' original anti-commer-cialism meant. When France’s Baron Pierre de Coubertin resurrected the modern Olympiad in 1896, his main concern was to exclude professional athletes, whom he regarded as seedy working men likely to be bribed by bookies. He put the trusteeship against shamateurism into the hands of a self-elected and self-

perpetuating 1.0. C., which contained in its heyday four princes, one archduke, eight peers, three knights or ritters, a rajah, a pasha, and an American millionaire, all concerned to see that young athletes were not polluted by getting any money. Today Coubertin would be far more horrified by the decline in gentlemanliness in his watchdog committees than by any decline in it among athletes. The subsidiary committees of the Olympic movement now most frequently contain Western sports bureaucrats with large expense accounts, Soviet secret policemen, and third-world politicians’ brothers-in-law with axes to grind. Since 1980, track and field athletes have attained the television exposure where sponsors can make their stars into millionaires. Three arguments, of differing moral value,- have become entangled with the debate whether athletics should go forthwith to the fully commercial golf-and-tennis system.

First, sports bureaucrats say that Mr Carl Lewis, Mr Edwin Moses, Mr Sebastian Coe, Mr Steve Ovett and others should instead preserve Olympic shamateurism by putting their high earnings into trust funds until they retire at some age like 29, thus enabling them to plough some money back into their sport, including its administration — i.e., to finance sports bureaucrats themselves.

This is a bad argument, because administration in Olympic sports is now rather crookeder than in commercial ones. In tennis anybody taking a drug would be barred by his colleagues from thus unfairly imbibing an artificial aid towards beating them. In athetics East European and American coaches stuff their stars with steroids, and — in spite of rumours that testing in Los Angeles might be tougher — no Olympic body has taken effective counter-action because of the usual Olympic fear of igniting another diplomatic row. Second, and unfortunately, fears of bought defections mean that Soviet and East German stars are not allowed by their Governments to glitter in tennis or golf, although individual South Africans can. Some East Europeans, such as the Czechoslovak tennis players, have operated a compromise, belonging to the international jet tennis set while sending a lot of money to their families and tax collectors back home, although with the really top Navratilovas eventually defecting. It is desirable to devise some such system to keep the fine young Soviet and East German athletes in world track and field.

Third, the eyes of those billion televiewers provide one of the Olympics’ remaining sporting benefits and one of its political risks. The benefit is that the billion viewers may switch on to watch track and field, but become interested in 22 lesser sports. Many more people take up archery, canoeing or volleyball after each Olympiad, and human happinessgains thereby. If the Olympics die after this year, it will be desirable to hold four-yearly world festivals of minor sports, probably in different sites across the world, but co-ordinated in the same fortnight of television programmes. The disadvantage of congregation in the same site is that a

billion pairs of eyes become a magnet for demonstrators. These range from chumps waving antiSoviet banners at young Soviet athletes (and probably attracting sympathy for them thereby) to Chernenkos calculating that they can get their own back for past Carterian insults to dear, dead Brezhnev by persuading fools that the Americans are too commercial. It is against those who wail against professionalism and commercial solvency, thus inviting expensive amateurism and constant politicisation, that the youth of the world should now be summoned to assemble for the overhaul of the old Olympic system so long overdue. Copyright — The Economist.