When the Olympics became boring…
Now the country song for ever lost its soul
when the guitar player turned to rock & roll
When I was a kid, I was enthusiastis about the Olympics. In 1988 in Korea, it was clear that the Soviets would get most medals, followed by the small country of German Democratic Republic. The Opening Sessions were spectacular and massive manifestations of crowd displays.
This year, I watched the Opening Session which was amazing. But when I heard about the repeated manipulations made to the images, I lost interest in the event as a whole. I read some articles on the internet on some sport results, but I never watched it on television.
In 1988, I still thought that the Olympics try to bring people from various countries together. Yet with Jacques Rogge openly admitting its impotence in the face of Chinese Human Rights violations, with Doping being so prominently used in almost all sports, and with commerce dominating sports health, the Olympics have become boring.
The situation in China is too complicated that it fits into the China-Evil-Tibet-Good-Pattern neatly. It’s also clear that a Sport Event does not change a country’s development overnight. But I think the whole rhetoric about human rights, olympic values, peace and prosperity is nonsense. The Olympic Games is acting like a huge corporation, maximizing its value by appealing to new markets. This however makes the Olympics as interesting as any other Corporate Sport Event.
Maybe London will change things. I still remember the great crowd enthusiasm at the Paralympics in Sydney in 2000. And maybe reforms need it times, if we look back in time, than eight years after the 1936 Games in Berlin, the Hitler-Regime was gone, 10 years after the 1980 Games in Moscow the Soviet Union broke up. Maybe in 2018, China will look very different from what it looks today.
