Watching the opening ceremonies of the Olympics on July 19 was like watching Cuisinart cuisine: all social, economic, political, and historical differences blended down to Andrew Lloyd Webberish theatrical pap. It was corporate myth-making at its most vigorous, an effort to get us to believe in the brotherhood of human beings by multinational corporations who have done more to fragment and poison that brotherhood than any other force in our history. We have recreated the Roman bread and circuses, appropriate fare for a dying empire.
But I suppose none of us should be surprised at such tasteless nefariousness, given who runs the International Olympic Committee (IOC). The 106 members of the IOC are led by the 76-year old Juan Antonio Samaranch, whose resume is not something one would associate with the declared ideals of the games. Under the regime of the fascist Spanish leader Generalissimo Francisco Franco, he served as a member of Franco's compliant parliament and as the nation's sports commissar, using athletics to glorify the fascist dictatorship.
When he took over the leadership of the IOC in 1980, he recruited underlings with whom he felt comfortable: Kim Un Yong, Samaranch's aide, a longtime Korean Central Intelligence operative involved in the Congressional bribery scandal called Koreagate; Major General Francis Nyangweso, Army Commander, Minister of Culture, and ambassador under Uganda's Idi Amin; Mohamad Hasan, who controls about half the world's trade in tropical hardwood and is a golfing buddy of Indonesia's dictatorial leader Suharto; Primo Nebiolo, head of the International Amateur Athletic Federation, who has been ejected from the presidencies of two other major sports federations for cheating scandals and election fraud; João Havelange, reputed arms dealer, friends with the former military regime of Argentina, and a favorite of the Nigerian generals who hanged Nobel Peace Prize candidate Ken Saro-Wiwa.
Their record matches their pedigree. Clear documented evidence exists that Samaranch et. al. conspired to cover up the fixed boxing matches in the 1988 Olympics, where American boxers lost to Koreans in matches the Americans had clearly won. At the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles, according to a 1994 BBC report, positive drug tests for 10 prominent athletes were dismissed and the lab closed that had done the testing. Other reports about sexual harassment, drug use, and spies on the payroll have surfaced but have never received any prominent reporting in the major media.
If we had full disclosure about the Olympics, some people might reconsider paying $1000 for tickets to support such a scurvy band of thugs and liars. However, don't expect to learn much from the crack investigative teams at NBC news because NBC's parent company, General Electric, has paid $3.57 billion for rights to the Olympics through 2008. There is simply too much money to be made by the IOC, which pulls down an estimated $2 billion every four years, for that kind of financial relationship to be jeopardized.
Christopher Hill, in his recent book Olympic Politics, states that talking about Olympic finances entails discussing "whether [the games] should now be seen more as a successful example of international capitalist entrepreneurship than as a festival of sport." He should have stated it more emphatically: it is the former, not the latter, because clearly, the Olympics have been "malled": the athletes are simply conduits to deliver us to Coca Cola, Kodak, IBM, Visa, BMW, and Xerox, who each coughed up $40 million to use the Olympic logo.
But this should lead us to some unsettling cognitive dissonance. While the dove of peace, composed of Atlanta children, wags its wings on the playing field, we all need to ask ourselves, What's the point in watching this high-ranging money exchange over the bodies of athletes? Why do we give it any monetary allegiance? What is it that we will be cheering under the searing July sun of Atlanta when we watch a festival conceived and operated by liars and fascists dedicated simply to their own enrichment? Where's the nobility in any of this?
(August 1996)