/ 28 March 2008

Olympic torch’s unflattering glare

As a small group of pro-Tibet demonstrators briefly disrupted the ceremonial lighting of the Olympic torch in Athens this week, they were underlining a central truth concerning the world’s greatest sporting festival: it tends to hold up a mirror to the face of its hosts and the result is not always flattering.

The past four Games offer a potted guide to the phenomenon in its various forms. Sixteen years ago the Barcelona Olympics reflected the aspirations of a nation keen to expunge the verdict of philosopher and republican activist José Ortega y Gasset, who famously wrote at the dawn of the Franco era that Spain was nothing more than the ”cloud of dust remaining after a great people have galloped down the highway of history”. In 1992 young and old came out to show the world that here was a new Spain bursting with vigour and imagination, ready to emerge from ancient poverty and the fascist hangover.

Four years later it was impossible to leave Atlanta without taking away the impression that the United States had shown its very worst side. Commercial considerations were paramount in the home town of Coca-Cola and CNN, while temporary cosmetic social engineering was as obvious as it promises to be in Beijing this summer.

Poor African-Americans were swept off the streets for the duration of the Games, a phenomenon particularly evident to those of us who were quartered in the black Clark University and, having stayed on an extra day or two, witnessed their quiet return once the circus had packed its tent and moved on.

The open-hearted citizens of Australia and the natural beauty of Sydney ensured that the Games of 2000 were a huge success. Spending an hour in a queue for a train after leaving a stadium at midnight has never seemed such fun. Even there, however, the cost and future usage of the Olympic Park facilities hovered like a small grey cloud.

Athens should have been another Barcelona, a Games held in a spectacular city under cloudless skies, but municipal inefficiency left the new facilities with a half-finished feeling. Over everything, even the incomparably beautiful old marble stadium where the marathon reached its climax, two questions hung in the air: Who is going to pay for all this, and of what use will these new arenas be to the people of a poor country?

No worries for the Chinese government, of course, over the financial and social cost of this summer’s Games.

Its powers are infinite and it is answerable to no one. The displacement of population, the lives lost in the rush to complete the stadiums quickly enough to show up Western inefficiency, the possible environmental impact: these are of no concern to a government whose only interest in the Olympic Games is to turn the event into a vehicle for its own global aggrandisement. And now it will be spending the next few months turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to those exploiting the opportunity to expose China’s failings. This week’s demonstration was just the start.

And when, in 2012, the Olympics hold up a mirror to London, what will we see? A city that offers a sanctuary to people whose only problem is finding new ways to spend their freakish wealth, or one whose teenagers stab and shoot one another to death in increasing numbers? A place that can run up spectacular new buildings all over the place or one whose free dental service has been allowed to rot?

When Jacques Rogge calls the Olympic Games ”a force for good”, as he did before Monday’s ceremony, the head of the International Olympic Committee is speaking an important truth, but a partial one.

For the athletes the Games are an experience that nothing can equal and they should never be deprived of that opportunity. From just about every other perspective, however, the Olympics as currently organised offer an unacceptable encouragement to greed, vanity and other forms of excess.

Only the establishment of a permanent facility for quadrennial use, built close to the original site in the Peloponnese and paid for by sponsors and broadcasters, will avoid the kind of repellent situation we are seeing now. — Â