Kevin Mitchell unveils the game behind the Games in which baubles are converted into big bucks as athletes and accessories are reduced to marketable commodities in a procession from the podium to the bank
THE organisers say that the Atlanta Games will “break even”. Well, that’s all right then. President Bill Clinton said: “They were the greatest Games in the history of the Olympics.” Fine. But for those whose priorities are neither fiscal nor political, and whose reputation does not depend on a chorus of domestic approval, the tournament was saved — as ever — only by the athletes and the people.
In many other respects the Atlanta Games lived down to the reservations held for them by Dick Pound, the outspoken Internationl Olympic Committee member, who described the gathering as a “flea market”. The Olympic ideal is dead and buried, as if we ever thought it would survive the manipulation of capitalism in full flow.
It is disingenuous to pretend that the thousands of tacky stalls, a tidal wave of crude sponsorship, the unrelenting hard-sell during the Games and a quite astounding “fire sale” of athletes and infrastructure last week, could leave the world with any other impression.
Two stories paint the picture.
Kerri Strug, the pixie who thrilled us with her bravery on the vault and then squeakily renounced her earlier commitment to remain amateur, is being marketed as a grotesque parody of herself. It might not seem so to her agent, Leigh Steinberg, but his rumoured efforts to negotiate the sale of Kerri Strug dolls is surely a joke too far. Can he not hear the sniggering asides: why don’t they just put a key in her back, wind her up and be done with it?
Strug and her American teammates went on the road this week to cash in on their team gold medal, and the unease that some people have about these remarkable, doll-like creatures grows. They have been transformed from athletes into sideshow oddities.
The other story is about an Italian company called Mondo, who paid Acog $6-million for the right to put down the super-fast Sportflex Super-X track at the new Olympic Stadium. A string of world records and the resulting heightened interest satisfied the organisers, not to mention NBC — that the surface was murder on the muscles and joints of all but the sprinters did not merit reflection.
Mondo did doubly well out of the deal. They had also bought the rights to sell half of the track in 100 000 pieces. Already they have had 1 000 orders; and the most hilarious carve-up is to come — the finish line is to be auctioned off, with a reserve of $25 000 expected.
The amount of money generated by the Olympics is almost impossible to calculate and since the closing ceremony elite athletes have joined the organisers in the cash orgy as they deal with the big hitters from Madison Avenue.
Michael Johnson has universally been declared the major winner, followed by Strug, decathlete Dan O’Brien, Carl Lewis, softball heroine and doctor Dot Richardson, basketball star Lisa Leslie and swimmer Amy Van Dyken.
Is there something significant about this list? They are all Americans. Visiting champions are obviously of no marketable use to a domestic audience so primed on glory during three weeks of near- hysterical, televised xenophobia. Perhaps those who doubted outside scepticism about the ethical foundations of this jamboree will see now where it was all leading: from the podium to the bank. As IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch was hanging gold medals around the necks of winners, some were calculating the conversion of a bauble into real money.
At least Americans are candid about the marriage of myth and moolah. Sean Brenner, of Team Marketing Report, says of Michael Johnson: “He accomplished an unprecedented athletic feat. But the big surprise is how personable he showed himself to be.”
Sports marketer Marty Blackman, of Blackman and Faber, says of O’Brien: “He’s the one athlete who could literally be compared with Superman.” He means “literally”; O’Brien is reduced to a cartoon character. Another sports marketer, Stephen Disson, says loftily of Lewis: “People wrote him off, but he showed incredible emotion when he went for that jump.”
There you have it: the next time you watch a renowned sports star, make a note of his or her demeanour, the glib aside, the winning wink. What you are seeing is the ultimate flowering of that late 20th century phenomenon: the whoring of sport.
It is the marketing of muscle, the selling of perceived charisma. Neither is necessarily linked to physical prowess — unless you count facial calisthenics, fluttering eyelashes or calculated sneers alongside hamstrings and pecs.
Chris Eubank would have made a great Olympian.
Unsophisticated interlopers, like the Russian wrestling legend, Aleksandr Karelin, generally don’t make it. After a trial with the Dallas Cowboys last week, Karelin was left hanging on the end of the phone for a reply.
Said a Cowboys coach: “Just an amazing athlete, huge arms, huge legs, just an incredible end tackle. But he was looking for large numbers of roubles.” What a cheek.
If only Karelin would smile more — or growl, even — he might end up on the Wheaties packet, the space coveted by every American gold medallist. If only he had an agent like Arliss the character in a TV series of the same name. A mythical sports agent only slightly larger than life, he arranges for a baseball star to sell his bodily fluids on a TV home shopping channel, succumbs to the seduction techniques of a teenaged tennis pro (an episode which veteran commentator Bud Collins said “was right on the nose”), and generally plays the game behind the game.
Only a few hundred, of course, of the 10 000 competitors or so who came to Georgia got into bed with the Arlisses. Most went home poorer in pocket and richer in spirit. While the elite have prospered beyond all previous reckoning, perhaps the real winners were those who missed out.
Meanwhile 12 nights after the bomb that killed Alice Hawthorne, a magnificent electrical storm whip- cracked through the deserted high-rise canyons of downtown Atlanta. It flashed and boomed, a torrent of menacing, cleansing fury — the sort of biblical metaphor that Jesus-lovin’ Georgians devour.
That’s how Mark Twain (who knew the South and its religious fervour well) might have had it. But the parable is flawed. There was no retribution, no wrong righted. Divine judgment was not delivered on a vain and sinful city.
There was just a river of rain to wash over the muck and tat of commercial excess that had clogged the streets of Atlanta for the 17 days of the tackiest Olympic Games of modern times — whatever Bill Clinton says.