For all its prestige and jubilation, the Olympics are a great grandstand for sports no one much cares for during the three years and 50 weeks they’re not showcased on television, blacking out the programs we’re really trying to watch. That’s not a secret.
Akin to the World Baseball Classic or National Pancake Day at IHOP, they’re a novel pursuit, garnering some modest if not ephemeral attention, but soon enough fading into irrelevance.
Their current iteration, already marred by controversy and flirting with infamy, threatens to fully strip the event of its token glory, good will, or whatever it is they aim to purport.
The 2008 Summer Games, like those in Athens in 2004 or Wherever in 2000, will fade too. China will go back to producing the chains with which they’ll enslave mankind a dozen years from now, and the “global community,” whatever that phrase stands to encompass tomorrow, will go back to watching celebrity dance series.
The fact remains, despite all of these less-than-encouraging truths, that China’s involvement as a world player is relevant, which makes the Olympics relevant. Which makes mounting talk of boycotting mountingly strange.
To be fair, the torch relay is somewhat separate from the games proper. And honestly, any brainchild of Adolf Hitler (which is what the relay is) needn’t be preserved.
But in Paris, London and San Francisco (the EMO/SAC of American cities), the Olympics turned into more of an exercise in indignation than athletic spirit. And the games haven’t even begun. No doubt when they do, athletes will be clouded in thicker controversy than the smog they’ll be competing in.
Where boycotting the Olympics became viable, or even sensible, I cannot say. Nothing much stands to be gained with an American absence, save for of course a few more gold medals for the Russian gymnastic team.
Hillary Clinton suggested earlier this month that President Bush should abstain from his invitation to Beijing in August as “a statement.” Well, aside from the obvious statement of last-minute desperation from the Hillary camp, Ms. Clinton seems to be missing the point.
Besides, the president has enough on his mind, what with reruns of “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader” and debating whether the ice in Antarctica is melting because it’s real warm or just a cool new CGI effect, without worrying about things like moral responsibility.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has already voiced her choice to miss the opening ceremony, as has UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, though that’s only because he has previous engagements, likely a cricket match in Glastonbury.
The idea of bestowing the Olympics on China back in 2001, I can only assume, was meant to ring the nation out of centuries of poverty and weakness, a thin hope that they would cut screwing around with human rights, war profiteering and all that — responsibility by way of humiliation, as it were.
Instead, China’s policies remain as murky as its air quality. Plus, its toy production has gotten shoddier.
Surely not the whole of China’s reemerging empire is a clan of mass-murdering feudal warlords, but Beijing’s dogmatism in the face of the United Nations and its insistence that it’s too busy building skyscrapers and buying cars to fund the Sudanese genocide just doesn’t reflect the most ethically progressive of nations.
The Olympics will essentially be China’s debutante ball — its coming-out party, grand reopening, what have you. Boycotting them probably isn’t the answer, and definitely serves no one.
If the Olympics are anything, it’s an international spotlight, and averting that gaze off China only gives them the chance to act in the dark.