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Last Updated: Aug 27, 2008 - 11:15:27 AM |
Looking at the Olympic flame late last week, its reflection flickering
in large puddles left by a heavy downpour, it was difficult to tell
that the two-week sporting extravaganza was coming to an end. The
day-to-day of the games still reigned: IOC President Jacques Rogge
chided Jamaican sprinter and gold medalist Usain Bolt for his
unsportsmanlike behavior; a Ukrainian athlete was asked to provide a
urine sample after winning silver in the heptathlon; and the 110-meter
hurdles took place in the evening without Chinese track star Liu Xiang,
who was injured. Away from the competition, American protesters had
been arrested and Chinese newspapers were reporting the death of party
patriarch Hua Guofeng.
But with the games rapidly approaching their end, many had started to
look back at Beijing 2008. A time of reckoning had begun.
The sports photographers working at the Beijing Olympic facilities, for
their part, were ecstatic. Never before in the history of the games had
their working conditions been so good, and never before have the
organizers allowed so much, made so many things possible and turned a
blind eye so often. They were permitted to climb onto roofs in Beijing
and steel beams in the Bird's Nest -- they were allowed to slip into
VIP seats and set up their cameras inside the swimming pool in the
Water Cube. Even the water pit in the 3,000-meter steeplechase course
wasn't off limits. For the photographers, the sky was the limit, and
for both them and the organizers, it was a win-win situation. Beijing
allowed them to shoot the kinds of images that presented the city at
its very best.
In the final days of the Olympics, athletes, too, were delighted by the
sports facilities China had prepared for them. Archers, hockey players,
volleyball players and indoor cyclists all had nothing but praise for
the complexes and arenas. Track & field athletes were pleasantly
awed by the Bird's Nest stadium.
A Sharp Divide
For them, and for the many journalists at the games, the competitions
inside stadium will remain unforgettable, the running and jumping in
front of an audience of 90,000 people sitting in steeply pitched rows
of seats. The setting created by the Swiss architects Herzog & de
Meuron was thoroughly grand -- they created what will likely become an
enduring monument, even as it remains unclear what that monument will
eventually come to represent. There were two worlds in Beijing, one on
the inside of the stadium and the other sporting facilities. And one on
the outside. And there was a sharp divide between the two.
On the inside, in the so-called Accredited Zones, these Olympic Games
were perfect. The images of these perfect games circled the globe,
accompanied by postcard pictures of pagodas, terracotta warriors and
graceful Chinese girls. Against the story told by this picture book,
criticism of the games seemed like little more than sour grapes.
But on the outside, in the city of Beijing and throughout China, the
lives of ordinary people went on. A number of changes in those lives
have taken place, to be sure, but they are still lives led under the
watchful eyes of the government. In this China, those disagreeable to
the government are simply removed, staging a protest remains a criminal
offense, public celebrations are frowned upon and all roads make wide
detours around restricted zones guarded by soldiers -- zones that
include Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
With these record-breaking Olympics now behind us, it is a time of
reckoning and a time to look forward. A new Olympiad has begun, as the
four-year wait begins until the next global festival of sports in
London. Those who are no longer interested in China can turn their
attention to sports itself, or to the activities of the major sponsors,
or the politics of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). What
happens next after these 29th Summer Games, the most politicized since
the 1980s?
'Disastrous Debates'
Where is the Olympic movement -- what is the status of sports -- in
these times of ongoing suspicions of doping, suspicions that were only
heightened with every win by a Jamaican sprinter and each additional
gold medal won by American swimmer Michael Phelps? How much more
commercialized can sports become? And what happens to the athletes when
the world becomes all but obsessed with keeping track of the medal
count?
"There are two grand delusions in sports," says Thomas Bach, one of the
four IOC vice presidents. He is a powerful man and a potential
candidate to succeed Jacques Rogge as the organization's president. He
wore a tracksuit to our meeting in the Olympic Family Lounge inside the
Olympic Village. "The one delusion," said Bach, "is that sport has
nothing to do with money. And the other one is that it has nothing to
do with politics. Both lead to unnecessary and sometimes disastrous
debates."
Bach is the sort of person who, when asked difficult questions, begins
by saying: Let's not kid ourselves. When asked about the IOC's
prediction that China would change for the better after the games, and
that it would "open up" politically, he said: "Let's not kid ourselves.
We, as the IOC, cannot change an entire society."
But, he conceded, at least, that the IOC must "recognize and express"
its opportunities and limitations more sharply in the future. Bach said
he believes that sport is an "icebreaker," and that it helps promote
processes. "But to change China? Or look at the Russia-Georgia
conflict. We have no mandate there. If we were to play the
intermediary, we would be overstepping our bounds."
Bach's conclusions, given that they were also those of the IOC, were
hardly unpredictable. About the games, he said, "all of that was done
exceedingly well." The organization, the sports complexes, the village,
the support, everything was outstanding, he said. "That, first of all,
is the most important aspect."
Bach was not overly surprised that a true, nation-wide celebration
never materialized. In Europe, both the World Cup and the European
Championships have been accompanied by massive public viewing festivals
across the continent. In China, nothing even close came to pass -- no
fan festivals in city centers and no giant screens on Tiananmen Square.
First of all, Bach said, the Olympic Games are not the World Cup and,
second, we shouldn't kid ourselves. "No one expected," said Bach, "that
a Chinese person would behave like an Italian football fan."
Difficult to Circumvent
Rain began drumming down onto the buildings in the Olympic Village.
After 20 minutes, as Bach began feeling more comfortable in the lounge,
he leaned back and switched from talking to chatting. He said that
"first of all," it is because of globalization that in Beijing a
Moroccan won a gold medal for Bahrain, an American played basketball
for Germany and the Georgian women's beach volleyball team included
Brazilians -- in a match against Russia, of all things.
Of course, Bach added, successful athletes are sometimes willing to
change their nationality for a gold medal these days, and if good
people can simply be purchased in the future, it would be a problem.
And it would be difficult to circumvent.
"We are already imposing lockout periods on people if they have already
competed for another country in the past," Bach explained. "But you
wouldn't believe some of the stories the athletes come up with to
explain the switch. What you can you say when they tell you it's
because they fell in love, or found a new home and love their new
country?"
When asked about the third grand delusion of sports -- that top
athletes are all clean and that world records are simply the products
of a healthy mind in a healthy body -- Bach said: Let's not kid
ourselves. Of course there are doubts about some of the contests, he
said, but the IOC and the national committees are doing everything
within their power to break the pattern.
According to Bach, the network of monitoring is now tighter than it has
ever before been. The scientists at the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA)
are convinced, Bach said, that there is currently no doping agent on
the market "that we cannot detect. And besides," said Bach, "let's look
at an example. We had 9,500 checks in Germany last year, and of those
about 70 were positive. Even if you add an estimated number of
unreported cases, there is really no reason for any blanket suspicion."
Some 4,500 doping tests were performed during the games in Beijing, and
only a handful of athletes tested positive for banned substances. A
Ukrainian heptathlete used a testosterone product, and a North Korean
shooter, a Vietnamese gymnast and four horses in the Olympic equestrian
team jumping competition in Hong Kong tested positive. But some of the
other athletes competing in Beijing have been caught doping in the
past, including Tunisian swimmer Oussama Mellouli, who was stripped of
his world championship a year ago for doping. "He shouldn't have been
here in the first place" said Örjan Madsen, the technical director of
the German Swimming Federation (DSV). "It's truly counterproductive."
Madsen, 62, arrived on bicycle from a far corner of the Olympic
village. He is a tall, lean man wearing a T-shirt, sunglasses and
sandals. He sat down in the stands of the amphitheater where the team
welcoming ceremony took place almost three weeks previously. Madsen
said that he doesn't know what to believe anymore.
: Where the Impossible Happened
In swimming alone, 25 world records were set at the Beijing games, and
since the beginning of the year swimmers have set 77 new records. "It's
a performance explosion," said Madsen, "the likes of which have never
even remotely happened before in history."
He waved his right hand flatly through the air and then pulled it
sharply upward. "The increases here are so great that it blows open all
standards. Statistically speaking, what we have seen here isn't even
possible -- and yet it happened nonetheless."
Madsen, a native of Norway and a former Olympic swimmer himself, went
on to earn a doctorate at the German Sport University in Cologne. He
has followed the developments in his sport for years. He knows that
fraud isn't the only explanation -- that there have also been advances
in materials and in the athletes themselves.
Total body suits, for example, have reduced drag and increased
buoyancy. And, of course, Madsen said, world-class athletes nowadays
behave like professionals who dedicate their entire lives to success,
eating and training accordingly. But 25 world records in Beijing alone?
At a single sports competition?
The Genetic Makeup of Athletes
"I don't want to speculate," Madsen said, "but I can't help but wonder
whether everything here was above-board." When his contract with the
German Swimming Federation expires at the end of October, he plans to
spend four months vacationing at his condo in the US Virgin Islands,
and he expects to spend some of that time thinking long and hard over
whether he even wants to remain a part of swimming. "There is a great
risk that, when it comes to doping, we will get ourselves into a
development that can no longer be controlled," he said.
Madsen is deeply concerned that hormone injections and stimulants could
soon become a thing of the past, making way for the truly horrific
practice of genetic doping, or manipulating the genetic makeup of
athletes. Scientists in laboratories are already studying ways to
modify genes in the bodies of future athletes so that their endurance,
speed and reaction capacity could be artificially enhanced. The genies
are still being kept in the bottle, but only because scientists have
yet to figure out how to put a stop to this genetic enhancement once it
is underway. Swimming coach Madsen doesn't want to be there when the
genies are released.
One lesson of the Beijing games, though, was already clear on the day
after the closing ceremony. The future of the Olympic Games, if not of
elite sports in general, will depend upon the outcome of the race
between cheaters and investigators. That, at least, is how Jürgen
Mallow, head coach of the German Track & Field Association (DLV),
sees things. Mallow, 63, wears a neatly trimmed goatee and looks like a
friendly teacher on the verge of retirement. He chose his words
carefully, hoping to sound levelheaded, but in the end he painted two
all-or-nothing scenarios.
Either everything goes well, as research becomes more intensive, tests
are improved and penalties become harsher. Or everything goes
drastically wrong. "But in that case the idea of the Olympic Games of
the modern age will be dead," he said. And manipulation will lead to
the demise of sports.
In Beijing, it became clear that audiences had begun splitting into new
groups. There are still those who naively believe in the goodness, the
beauty and the purity of sports, even if it goes against their better
judgment. On the other end of the spectrum are those who have given
into despair and turned away from sports entirely because they no
longer trust it. A third group blindly worships the winners, no matter
how their victories came about -- perhaps even admiring them for their
clever, underhanded methods.
Doping Does Not Affect Sales
It doesn't help that doping has yet to affect the bottom lines of
corporations that make money from sports. Sports as an industry remains
in an extended phase of seemingly limitless marketability. It continues
to generate money like a well-oiled machine, and the consumer has not
yet begun punishing companies or brands, even if their spokesmen are
victorious athletes who owe their success to doping.
Jan Runau, a former triathlete and now a corporate spokesman for
Adidas, spoke carefully of the "ambivalent behavior" of sports fans.
According to Runau, while doping may be generally frowned upon, it does
not affect sales. "All the sprinters who were caught," Runau said,
"Marion Jones, Justin Gatlin, have not affected Nike's success."
It is as if nothing, and no one, could destroy the public's fascination
with the Olympics. "The fact is," said Runau, "that a billion people
watch the 100-meter race." And this fact is so momentous that at the
moment when the starting gun is fired, all qualms are forgotten and the
world becomes enthralled with that single moment of competition.
This notion is borne out by the fact that since the end of the week
before last, when the track & field competition began at the Bird's
Nest stadium, the talk of human and other rights, of Tibet and the
Uighurs, had largely subsided. Sports overshadowed everything else,
benefiting everyone involved: viewers, sponsors, athletes, the IOC,
China's Communist Party and its government. It was the ultimate win-win
situation.
Everyone behaved as if nothing were the matter. McDonald's CEO Jim
Skinner was in Beijing, and so were some of his counterparts, including
Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn, Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche, General
Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, as well as
the Chinese and Indian corporate executives whose names the world has
yet to learn, and whose factories are about to produce the next
economic miracle. They too are part of the Olympic family. They are the
ones who make this festival of sports possible. They pay for it, no
matter what the cost.
Can London Compete?
Beijing cost the major sponsors almost 10 times what they paid for the
summer and winter games in Seoul and Calgary 20 years ago. Twelve
corporations generated $866 million (€559 million) in the period
between 2005 and 2008, and sponsors are apparently already lining up to
be a part, somehow, of the London games in 2012: with a logo, a
licensed product, advertising rights, or at least with the title of
"official supplier" to the games.
It remains to be seen whether London will be like Beijing, where the
sponsors' pavilions were lined up next to the Water Cube, the
gymnastics building and the fencing arena. Whether the big, ambitious
showcase pavilions effectively conveyed the spirit of the brands, of
Coca-Cola and Kodak, McDonald's and Lenovo, is equally questionable.
In Volkswagen's "Showcase," a futuristic hybrid, part fantasy and part
auto dealership, artists flew through the air on wire cables 10 times a
day, drawing figures in front of giant video screens. At the dedication
ceremony for the VW pavilion, CEO Winterkorn told the audience that it
is clear to anyone witnessing the enthusiasm of the Chinese people
"that the Olympic idea is alive and well."
That, of course, is one point of view. But there are others. On the
northern outskirts of Beijing, in a district that is part commercial
zone and part exclusive residential neighborhood, Ai WeiWei greeted his
visitors looking exhausted. The artist, who played a decisive role in
the design of the Bird's Nest stadium, seemed unhappy -- and he was.
Unable to Decipher
He lives and works in an enormous stone house, an oasis of levelheaded
style in the colorful, post-urban cacophony of Beijing. Cats stroll
through the garden and employees walk silently so as not to disturb the
master of the house, talking in whispers and serving green tea in
beautiful glasses.
Ai WeiWei calls the Bird's Nest a "showcase of propaganda." It is a
good building, he said, but one that was utilized by the wrong people.
In the West, said Ai WeiWei, everyone was excited about the opening
ceremony and China in general, and yet every second of these games was
poisoned by ideology, and by hidden messages to the Chinese that
foreigners were unable to decipher.
"On the day after the opening ceremony, it said in the paper here that
good Chinese watch the games on television," said Ai WeiWei. "It was an
unconcealed warning not to go out into the streets."
He said that he didn't really watch the opening ceremony. He was in a
café with a friend on that evening and happened to see a few images
from the event on a wall-mounted TV. But those images, he said, were
nothing but the empty productions of an anxious, extremely nervous
government. "The state has no vision of what China should be," said Ai
WeiWei, "and the games only helped postpone the problems that are now
coming."
He contradicted himself several times in the course of a half-hour
conversation. He spoke of hidden messages to the Chinese people, but he
also said that the games were not meant for the domestic public at all.
He argued that China wanted to demonstrate its strength to the rest of
the world, but then he claimed that the Beijing leadership couldn't
care less about what the world thought of it.
Europe's Gradual Demise
The contradictions were not just limited to the conversation with Ai
WeiWei. At the same time, elsewhere in the city, Chinese women wearing
bikinis in the pouring rain were fighting for the bronze medal in beach
volleyball -- a thoroughly Western event -- accompanied by American
rock music from the 1980s. In the main press center, officials from the
London Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) were walking
around, looking confused. They were asking themselves how their 2012
Olympic Games can possibly live up to the spectacle of Beijing. So far,
none of them has come up with any bright ideas.
The London games will certainly be different, and it is already clear
that there will be no landmark buildings of the sort built for the
Beijing games. There will be no fake fireworks shown on television or
lip-synching little girls placed in front of microphones. The Londoners
will emphasize tradition over modernity, volleyball in Earls Court and
riding in Greenwich Park, tennis at Wimbledon, football in Wembley
Stadium and a triathlon in Hyde Park. It all sounds very charming, but
whether it will work remains to be seen.
The games in London will also need a theme, but simply invoking a
greener environment and general world improvement will not do the
trick. Big issues were part of the mix in Beijing -- human rights and
globalization, freedom of the press and dictatorship -- and it was all
very exciting. There were other important concerns at stake, too: the
future and strength of a state-sponsored athletic system, doping, the
age of child gymnasts -- and China's rise and Europe's gradual demise.
LOCOG Chairman Sebastian Coe characterized the Olympic Games as an
"invisible social worker." In Great Britain, Coe said, there are fewer
and fewer children who take part in sports at all. London's 2012 games,
he hopes will perhaps reverse this trend. It didn't sound very
exciting. In fact, it sounded as if the Beijing games would remain
unsurpassable.
Source:Ocnus.net 2008
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