Beyond Spectacle: Critically Examining the Olympics Industry

Now that the dread, biennial excess is over, we can perhaps talk rationally about the Olympics, which looks more and more like a weird international civic religion or cult (at least among the Passive Spectator Classes). One such sign is that ordinary (and ordinarily intelligent and creative) human persons have trouble being (even ordinarily) rational when discussing the Olympics. Irrational, cultist devotion does not make for robust, healthy, or useful public discourse.

The Olympics industry -- I refuse the noxious "Olympic family" and "Olympic movement" -- has the same political economic structure as professional sport stadium development in the US: namely, public costs and private profits. A greedy few -- owners, developers, vendors -- pocket millions, while the rest of us are left holding the bag.

It's a private, monopolistic racket, dominated by the IOC, the only private club more annoying than the US Senate, and whose charter claims "supreme authority" over all aspects of the industry. Such fascist aspiration is nothing new to the IOC's president, Juan Samaranch, an ex-official in the fascist regime of Spain's Franco. The IOC is a private club of (mainly) European and American wankers, whose main goal seems to be to accrue as much free travel and mooching as possible. (This is not entirely true; the IOC does have members from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It even has some women, who have only been members since the early 1980s. While scandal rocked the IOC in the past two years, lots of racist finger-pointing and relativist nonsense was trotted out, most of which was meant to direct blame and hostile media attention onto non-European and non-North-American IOC delegates.)

Of course the IOC doesn't see the Olympics industry this way, but the cultists never know they are epistemologically perverse. Rather than deal with the critics, the IOC talks a lot about nebulous superstitions like "Olympism" and the "transcendence of international sport." Non-political, non-partisan sport, or so the IOC catechism instructs, spreads good will, mutual understanding, and a whole lotta love among the world's population. I'm not sure what kind of credulity it takes to believe that fairy tale without some further investigation, but I am sure I don't have enough of it.

So, while the upside of the Olympics is nebulous at best, what are we not being told by the corporate media and the IOC about the downsides? In short, the Olympic spectacle is very expensive to produce, has numerous hidden costs, and the financial burdens are shouldered disproportionately by the public at large, particularly by the poor.

The Olympic spectacle -- as has been the case in every Olympics since Munich in '72 -- is always accompanied by militarization of the police, increased repression of dissent (both of the Olympics and whatever pressing social concerns exist in the host city or country -- in Sydney, it's meant further repression of Aboriginal activists), and an atmosphere of palpable hostility to civil liberties. In America this has happened in Los Angeles in '84 and Atlanta in '96, and one expects it in Salt Lake in '02 as well.

The Olympic spectacle accelerates and normalizes one of the most disturbing trends of late western capitalism, the privatization of public space by corporate interests. I've written often, and at length, about this issue, so regular Monkeyfist readers don't need to hear it again. In short, democracy presupposes public space, and that is something that corporations cannot, and will not, abide. Thus corporations are routinely, and often slyly, attacking it (and the very idea of it too). And they are winning.

The Olympic spectacle distorts authentic participation in civic life. Someone please explain to me, without resorting to superstitious nonsense about the "spirit of Olympism," why 20,000 ordinary citizens should volunteer to enrich elite and corporate interests during the two weeks the Olympic spectacle otherwise ties their city or region into logistical knots. During the rest of our lives, in America, at least, civic participation is something Ralph Nader yammers about, while corporations try to convince us we are nothing but atomic consumption machines fueled by manufactured desire. The Olympic spectacle twists civil society, that is, our common life together, into a kind of sickening army of mindless corporate boosterism.

The Olympic spectacle is a deeply sexist institution. As I said above, the IOC has only admitted women into its ranks since the 1980s. The structure of Olympic and international sport remains deeply inequitable, and it contributes to the impression that women are, as a whole, less capable than men to engage in high-level sport. The motto of the Olympics sums it best; if "higher, stronger, faster" is the essence of the Olympic spectacle, then it doesn't include women. Why not "more precision, more elegance, more endurance"? The elitist French wanker who founded the IOC, Baron de Courbetin, clearly despised women, and he conceived the Olympics as a glorious exaltation of patriarchy: "We must continue," the old French goat said, "to try to achieve the following definition: the solemn and periodic exaltation of male athleticism with internationalism as a base, loyalty as a means, art for its setting, and female applause as reward." What a crock of misogynistic crap.

The Olympic spectacle is an extension of the war waged against the poor. In Sydney, Bread Not Circuses reports that the Olympics has all but destroyed the affordable housing market for poor folk, meant the increase of homelessness, the alienation of the poor from centers of urban life, and generally made life more difficult for the poor. This is hardly an effect worth celebrating or contributing to, and its predictablity makes it even more unworthy. Anti-olympic activists in Sydney report that no-cause evictions spiked fourfold in the months leading up to the Sydney spectacle; rents soared precipitously all over the city; and the number of Sydneyites living on the streets increased as well.

No other event at the beginning of the 21st century will have a greater impact on protecting the environment than the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. -- Sydney Games PR

The Olympic spectacle contributes to corporate greenwashing and, in some cases, to environmental despoilation and abuse. In Sydney alone, in addition to the serious problems with the Homebush site, there were environmental concerns raised by local citizens and environmental activists about, according to Helen Lenskyj (about whom more below), Rushcutters Bay yachting facilities, Ryde water polo park, Eastern Suburbs bicycling course, Bankstown velodrome, and mutilation of the ecologically unique and world famous Bondi Beach into a beach volleyball stadium. Starting with the '94 Winter Games spectacle in Lillehammer, the IOC has required environmental considerations of all host cities. But it is the greenwashing kind favored by big corporations. Such greenwashing, mingled with the Olympic spectacle, denudes the robust environmentalism that actually makes a dime's worth of difference in the real world. So corporate-led greenwashing is enriched and strengthened insofar as propaganda about Olympics industry is successful; and that's reason enough, in my view, to oppose both.

When you clear your head of the Olympic quasi-religious mumbo jumbo, and stop caring for a minute about just how badly Mastercard and IBM and Coca-Cola want you to desire the Olympic spectacle, you can find ample reason to oppose the Olympics -- or at least to question the whole damnable racket. But the simplest criticisms are usually the best: there are too many social problems in the cities and countries that host the Olympics to waste money on an international party, complete with athletic entertainment. As for the unfortunate billions for whom the Olympic spectacle is callous mockery of their plight, they'd certainly be uplifted by the "spirit of Olympism," if only they could get better television reception, or if they could just get ahead of starvation long enough to enjoy the merits of the hammer throw or Greco-Roman wrestling.

(For more about the real costs of the Olympics industry, see the Anti-Olympic Alliance, Bread Not Circuses, and Helen Lenskyj's book Inside the Olympic Industry.)