Greece's reality show
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The Olympic Games serve as a reminder of the exalted qualities of body, mind and spirit that transcend cultures. K.P. MOHAN on its 28th edition to open soon in a miraculously transformed Athens.
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AFP
Worth celebrating ... back to its roots.
"BACK home they ask only one question: `are you an Olympic champion?', and that is what counts," said Haile Gebrselassie a few years ago. A living legend in Ethiopia, Gebrselassie has won four world championship titles since 1993. But the ones that really count in Ethiopia, a country with a great tradition in distance running, are his two gold medals from the Olympics — in 1996 and 2000.
So, why should the Olympics crown be so different from the world title? Why are the Olympic Games often referred to as the "greatest show on earth"? Why is it that being simply an Olympian is still so important?
Because there is nothing like the Olympics in the world of sport. Perhaps there is nothing like the Olympics in any other sphere of life, too. The Olympics is the ultimate challenge for a sportsman; it is the ultimate test of body and soul. And it is like several world championships and regional games being put together on one huge stage. With a television audience of more than 3.5 billion. You are feted by kings and presidents when you win an Olympic medal; you are gifted with bungalows and cars.
The Games are going back to their roots in Greece after more than 100 years. The ancient games were borne in Olympia, about 145 km west of Athens, in honour of the Greek god Zeus. When the Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin, revived the games, they were held for the first time in Athens in 1896.
Quite significantly, the athletics competitions in these 28th Olympic Games will kick off at Olympia, with the shot put contests in both men and women's sections being held there. It will be after 1611 years that the Games would be returning to the spot where they originated and where they were buried by Roman Emperor Theodosius before being revived by Coubertin. Shot put was unknown to the ancient Greeks. Stadion running, discus and javelin were some of the early athletic events in that era.
No sign of politics
It is said politics was part of the ancient games. And we know politics has remained part of the Olympic movement through the years though everyone agrees, now and then, that the two should never be mixed.
Moscow in 1980 and Los Angeles, in 1984, were prime examples of how politics could ruin a sports spectacle. Mercifully, Athens will welcome around 10,500 athletes from a record 202 countries. And there is no sign of political trouble. (In Olympics, there are smaller principalities and independently-administered areas that compete as countries. Thus the larger number of countries than there actually are.)
Whether they are a tiny group of islands or the most populous nation, all of them have made their mark down the years in the Olympic Games. The Bahamas, a cluster of islands in the Caribbean, with a population of just 3,00,000, won two medals at the last Games in Sydney including the women's sprint relay gold. On the other hand, the two most populous nations, China and India, had 59 and one respectively.
India's chances
Olympic success has nothing to do with populations as Indians often try to make out. Eight gold medals in hockey apart, India has had just three bronze medals from the Olympics. The script could change somewhat in Athens. For, we do have medal hopes in an assortment of disciplines — from tennis (Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi), to shooting (Anjali Vedpathak and Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore), and from athletics (Anju Bobby George), to archery, through team events.
Of course, hockey remains deep within Indian hearts in these quadrennial sojourns, but the events leading up to the Games, not to speak of the record against top teams in recent months, do not inspire confidence.
Sport nowadays brings into focus the scourge of doping. Not since Ben Johnson was sent packing from the Seoul Games for a doping offence has the use of performance-enhancing drugs gained such world-wide attention as these past few months. Not a day passes without a fresh lead into the doping controversy in the United States, associated with the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO) investigations that you start wondering whether there is anything left of "clean" sport in this world of commercialisation and megabucks.
The Olympics had remained the bastion of amateurism till 1988 when the tennis professionals and NBA stars were allowed to come in.
Yet, football keeps itself aloof by not exposing its World Cup stars while the International Olympic Committee (IOC) does not seem to be averse to the idea of including newer sport in the programme almost every year despite mounting skepticism about the unmanageable levels that the Games have reached.
The gigantism and the economics of the Games have not proved a deterrent even to countries like India which keep making claims about bidding for the Games. Athens would have spent anything from eight to 10 billion dollars in hosting these Games, with 1.2 billion dollars earmarked for security alone.
After 9/11, security has become a huge issue for various agencies and an estimated force of around 70,000 men is being brought together for the Athens Games to protect the Olympic family.
Will the Greeks be able to recover the money being sunk into these Games? Going by Sydney's phenomenal marketing success, it's "yes" but then when you look at the fact that Montreal just finished paying up for the costs of the 1976 Games, you understand the enormity of the task. The Greeks might just be tempted to say "let it be another hundred years".
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