There was a woman in Penfold Park the other day wearing a tee-shirt displaying the words “Another fucking Olympic games”. We must bear in mind, of course, that she may not have read it carefully before buying it, of if she did, did not understand the message or recognise the F-word.
Still, this is not a unique sentiment. It is a feature of the great international sportfests that the number of people who travel to the site of the event in the hope of watching the proceedings is more or less matched by the number of people who take a holiday from their homes to avoid the visiting crowds.
It would perhaps not be fair to apply this crudely to the current Olympics in Paris, because Paris notoriously empties itself of locals on July 14 (when the school term finishes) and is generally inhabited only by people who cater for visitors until sometime around the end of August.
Still, it must be recognised that the Olympics are something which people can have enough of. My dim memories of media coverage go back to the Melbourne summer games in 1956. Looking at the list I do not seem to have registered the winter versions at all.
There is a certain rhythm to these things. When the host city is chosen there is a whiff of scandal. Then there are the first of the pained noises about the budget which will continue until well after the games, because the bid budget always turns out to have been imaginative when it hits reality.
In the run-up to the great event there are some cliff-hanging stories around the possibility that some vital piece of infrastructure will not be ready in time. Then there are arguments in most countries about selection. Hong Kong’s version of these used to concern some athlete who was eligible but did not – um – look Chinese and was not selected. We seem to have outgrown this particular problem. There continues, on the other hand, to be subdued muttering about the number of Hong Kong Olympians who moved to the SAR after narrowly missing inclusion in the China team.
During the games there will be the usual dust-ups about refereeing, cheating, tactless winners and tactless losers, surreptitious efforts to help the home team, and so on. These will be off-set by magical moments of sportsmanship and joy. On the whole most of the media people and all of the officials will conclude that the games were a success, whatever that means, except for Munich 1972, marred by a massacre.
The host city will then be left to pick up the bill, which can be enormous – Montreal (1976) took decades to pay off its Olympic debts. Los Angeles (1984) seems to have been unique in actually showing a profit. There is also the question whether all the facilities specially built will, as the boosters predict, be useful afterwards. Here also outcomes vary. London (2012) seems to have found a use for all its Olympic erections; Athens (2004) still has weed-infested sports sites which were never used again.
Social scientists have determined that the economic benefits of hosting the games are overstated and probably non-existent, while they do give a lot of harmless pleasure to the population of the host city while they last. This is a difficult attraction to sell politically and bids to host have become sparse.
The current games, I notice, have already produced two rows of a kind to which we were not treated in the 20th century. The first concerns woman boxers who used to be men.
This did not come up in the old days, partly no doubt because there were no woman boxers. I recall some carefully phrased expressions of suspicion about well-built Russian women in the throwing events. The two boxers at the centre of the current row were excluded from the last Olympics. But the organising body for Olympic boxing was changed after a refereeing scandal and the new one revised the rules.
I confess to being non-plussed by the moral issues involved. It is an important moral principle that all people should be treated the same, and if they wish to be women they should be allowed to be women. On the other hand it is also an important principle that athletic contestants should be fairly matched, and in some sports, including boxing, being a man for the first 15 or 20 years of your life apparently confers a big advantage.
My Solomonic solution would be to ban boxing altogether as being a depraved pursuit unfit for decent human beings, who ought to be repelled by the idea of beating someone else unconscious. But that is not going to happen.
The other very 21st century contribution is the row over the Dutch volley ball player – unashamedly male – who was convicted some years ago, when he was 19, of having sex with a 12-year-old girl.
In England, where he did it – they met on-line, of course – this is treated as rape, and he was accordingly sentenced to several years in jail. After some months, though, he was returned to Holland, where consensual sex with under-age partners is, though still illegal, regarded less seriously. So he was released soon after.
The question which then arose from several directions was whether it was acceptable for such a person to be in an Olympic team. The Dutch view is that the man concerned has expressed remorse, served his time, recognised the error of his ways and is entitled to be treated like any other citizen who is good at volleyball.
The contrary view is that the man is a paedophile and should be shunned athletically, presumably for the rest of his life, as an inappropriate role model for young people who may regard Olympians as examples of behaviour to be emulated. Objectors also claim that having him on the court, pitch or whatever is upsetting for victims of sex crimes generally and his victim in particular
I confess to finding it easier to find a side to agree with in this one. Criminals who have done their time and expressed a decent level of reform and regret are entitled to be treated as ordinary members of society. If we are to bar convicted sex offenders from the Olympics what happens when some team turns out to include a bank robber, a mugger, a retired member of Islamic State or a fencer who honed his sword skills by beheading adulterous women in Saudi Arabia?
Note that the latter competitor will not have been jailed. A global sporting festival will include people from a variety of different backgrounds and legal regimes. Attitudes to sex are particularly fraught with geographical variations. The idea that some sex offenders should be treated to life-time ostracism is a Western thing.
As for the argument that this is all unfair to victims, I discern a whiff of hypocrisy. The fact is that there is a fairly small following for three-a-side volleyball, and the Dutch team is not particularly prominent. The player concerned has been in the international side since 2017. Nobody would have noticed his inclusion if nobody had made a fuss about it.
Update: There is an error in this piece. I supposed, and wrote, that the two boxers in a row over their hormone levels were people who had been born as males and transitioned to female. This is not the case. Both the women concerned were recognised and registered as female at birth and have gone through the rest of their lives as women. Their elevated testosterone levels are a result of a rare medical condition. The dilemma remains the same: does the effect of this produce so much unfairness, or danger, that the two athletes should be barred from competition? But opinions about the merits or otherwise of gender transition are nothing to do with it. Thoughtful piece in the Guardian here.
tim's experiment 