Any Blog dealing with how the modern World has been corrupted by the corporatization of everything, and the spectre of global puppeteers affecting our lives, has to mention the Olympic games. As pointed out by the brilliant journalist, Doug Sanders recently, the IOC needs this games to be run by an authoritarian regime like China. It needs this immense quadrennial exercise in self-promotion to get bigger, but there aren’t many governments left that can support it.
I went through most of the 90’s hating the nostalgia of the 1960’s that washed through our popular culture: Movies, trends, and TV that celebrated ten years in the lives of writers, producers and actors alike; almost God-like reinventions of Political, Artistic and Business figures, and the presentation of basically everyday decision to the importance of The Big Bang. I now realise that these movies, trends, songs and virtually everything else were exercises in nostalgia when these current day human megaphones were younger, more easily impressed, and who felt cheated by the decades since their ‘golden age’. From Oliver Stone’s fantasies about Vietnam and the US at the time, to the agenda pushed on us that if JFK, Bobby, and Martin had lived, the World would have been different. Of course, as I now reach their age, I am beginning to feel the same.
I wasn’t even 10 years old in 1970, so while my cohort saw the other side of the coin (Nixon, Northern Ireland, Airline terrorism etc.), my childhood was full of two great movements: The Space Race and the Olympics every two years: It seemed to me the fact that we were going to the moon, and could put live TV pictures of amateur athletes battling each other for nothing more than a hunk of metal at the end of a ribbon were both examples of a not-too-distant future when we could bury all known hatchets, and live together as grown ups, not squabble like bored 3 year-olds at your Aunt’s house on a Sunday afternoon. It has only recently that it has become clear to me that these two great human endeavours were simply part of the Cold War that haunted my life for 30 years. The Olympic Games as a political tool? Yes! And being promoted by one of the largest, and unaccountable, movements on earth.
In Mexico in 1968, the two ‘Black Power’ salutes on the podium was a way that the old USSR could crow about how America was at war with itself. The US was embarrassed and forbade anything like that ever again, but by the time Munich ’72 came around the sheer amount of USSR and US athletes marching in a paramilitary fashion reached proportions only seen on May Day parades in Moscow. Only the missiles and tanks were missing. The slaughter of Israeli athletes was – in a way – proof that while these two nations stared each other down, other smaller nations with political agendas and a disregard for human life could grab their own headlines. With Security a major issue for 1976, Montreal was chosen as a safe haven that the Americans could ‘look after’.
If the Americans could salve it’s conscious over Vietnam, and make sure that all of its athletes were safe, it was to boycott the Moscow Olympics, and the Soviets returned the favour in Los Angeles. It is not a stretch of the imagination to understand that the US supported Seoul’s bid for the 1988 Olympics in order to protect ‘everyone’ from the North and the evil empire. They got a break when the USSR went bankrupt, so we had a Spanish Olympics and then an Australian one. Neither of which were as successful as 1984, which, in a turnaround from 8 years earlier, did nothing for sport in the States, or LA in particular, but were a huge financial success. The Athens games almost bankrupted the entire country, so the IOC needed a large nation to step forward and re-start the Cold war – especially as the European Union would help out the London bid for 2012. That is why China is hosting the largest peacetime movement of people in human history, and hosting it in an architectural centrepiece that is the largest indoor space ever built on the planet.
Heroes will be made (and you know it’s Michael Phelps, thanks to the amount of ink and pixels spent on him), and hunks of metal on ribbons will be won and lost. Billions of TV’s will watch the games – probably the most ever but this isn’t ‘China’s coming out party’ or anything else so altruistic. The real winner will be the advertisers opening up new markets for luxury goods that people cannot afford, and – most of all – the money held in trust by the IOC. They have gone through 10 Olympiads growing their brand to the most recognised on earth, and raking in Billions of dollars. They have nowhere to go but up, but is there anywhere left to go? Is there anyone rich enough to host future games? Is there anyone that can afford it?
If not, it’s going to simply end – the most successful business model of all time. One whose logo is understood by every person on earth, and whose public aims are completely misunderstood. “We will support war if it means making money.”
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