That Loathsome Spectacle Called The Olympics

Let the Show Begin!  1936. The Master Race Arrives!

The Olympic "Movement." Now there is a masterly stroke of marketing.

The Olympic movement is about wholesome competition, striving for world class excellence, friendship across cultures, peace, developing healthy, strong, untainted bodies. That is the sales pitch.

Of course, having known several young people who competed to reach the Olympics (diving, swimming, wrestling) and two athletes who actually got to the Olympics (kayaking), the Phantom is well aware of the virtues of sport, of mastery of anything. 

There are annual world championships, as any viewer of ESPN will know, in a wide world of sports.  But the Olympics seems special. It seems special because it has been marketed longer,harder and more expensively than any other. 

Words like "prestige" and "respect" and "going for the gold" all infuse the hoopla.

But among all the sports championships none matches the Olympics for sheer perfidy and ideological corruption. 

The modern Olympics is said to date from 1898, the brainstorm of a Frenchman, but the true dawn of the modern Olympic games is rooted firmly with Adolf Hitler in 1936.  All modern Olympic games flow from that Olympics in spirit and legacy. 

Before Hitler, the Olympics were a relatively modest affair, with temporary bleachers and venues and athletes finding lodging where they could. But Hitler saw in the Olympics just what Vladimir Putin and so many other despots and political hacks have seen: the most golden of opportunities to advertise his own philosophy and success.  

Hitler insisted the Olympic stadium be ten times as large as originally planned, built the first Olympic village to house the athletes. He had for years been organizing health camps for Hitler youth, with blonde boys and girls lifting logs and throwing balls and doing calisthenics and this was the perfect stage for him to show off the results of the great blonde master race. 

Of course, no Jews allowed. The best three women swimmers from Austria happened to be Jewish and they were forbidden to represent Austria and later banned forever from all international competition. 

Why Let a Little Racism Matter? Avery Brundage

Avery Brundage, who was the head of the American Olympic committee saw that the Berlin Olympics might collapse because, at first,  Hitler had no interest in seeing his master race compete against the "Untermenschen" or sub humans from around the world, including Negroes, Jews, Slavs and other non Aryans.  Determined to rescue the Berlin games, Brundage sailed for Germany and held much publicized meetings with Hitler and the Nazis, who, by that time saw an opportunity to glamorize their world view and agreed to one Jew here and there and some Black athletes.  So the games were on!  Of course, the tokenism was a sham and the truth was, there was so much money and political will little things like hate and exclusion because of race or religion were swept aside.

The whole spectacle of the three tiered winners stand, the raising of the flags of the three winners and the playing of the national anthema of the champion, tears streaming down his or her face--just so proud to have won for my country--is about as naked as jingoism ever gets. 

Oh, the horror! A political statement!

But politics and the ugliness is never far from stage. When Tommy Smith and Jon Carlos took the stand to receive their gold and bronze medals at the 1968 Olympics and raised their hands in a Black Power salute, to say we are not crying, we bow our heads because things are not good for our people at home--they were thrown out of the Olympics. They had made a political statement! Imagine that! A political statement in front of the flag poles and the band. How inappropriate!

And let us not forget a true American Hero, Joseph Frederick. You may not know the name, but you may have heard of "Bong Hits for Jesus."  That was the case which occurred when the Olympic torch was being carried through town and Mr. Frederick's high school principal insisted all the students line the sidewalks as the torch was borne down the street, an exercise of academic and patriotic value if ever a public school has had one. 

The First Amendment Takes a Hit from the Supreme Court

Mr. Frederick walked to the other side of the street, careful to be off school property and unfurled a banner, "Bong Hits for Jesus" as the torch was carried by. The enraged principal, her moment ruined, charged across the street, tore down the banner and suspended Mr. Frederick for 10 days. The case went to the Supreme Court, which decided that while Freedom of Speech had clearly been violated, Freedom of Speech was not as important to good order and discipline in public schools and found for the principal.

Thus the Olympics have been responsible for the most reprehensible decision by a Supreme Court since the Dred Scott case.  Some would argue Citizens United was just as bad, but that was really about whether speech is money and corporations people, so the principles are more diluted. Here we have, pure and simple, freedom of speech, the most basic right in any democracy, a casualty of the Olympic Movement.