Opinion Dissent and the Olympics
The organisation behind the spectacle is elitist,domineering and crassly commercial to its core
Jules Boykoff and Alan Tomlinson
While Europe roils in economic turmoil,London is preparing for a lavish jamboree of international goodwill: in a few weeks,the city will host the 2012 Summer Olympics. But behind the spectacle of athletic prowess and global harmony,brass-knuckle politics and brute economics reign. At this nexus sits the International Olympic Committee,which promotes the games and decides where they will be held. Though the IOC has been periodically tarnished by scandal usually involving the bribing and illegitimate wooing of delegates those embarrassments divert us from a deeper problem: the organisation is elitist,domineering and crassly commercial at its core.
The IOC,which champions itself as a democratic catalyst for collaboration between all parties of the Olympic family, is nonetheless run by a privileged sliver of the global 1 per cent. This has always been the case: when Baron Pierre de Coubertin revived the Olympics in the 1890s,he assembled a hodgepodge of princes,barons,counts and lords to coordinate the games. Eventually the IOC opened its hallowed halls to wealthy business leaders and former Olympians. Not until 1981 were women allowed in.
Even today,royalty make up a disproportionate share of the body; among the 105 IOC members are the likes of Princess Nora of Liechtenstein,Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark and Prince Nawaf Faisal Fahd Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia. The United States has only three representatives,two of them former Olympic athletes.
Then there are the excessive demands that the IOC makes on host cities. For instance,the host cities have had to change their laws to comply with the Olympic Charter,which states that no kind of demonstration or political,religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites,venues or other areas.
The IOC also makes host cities police Olympics-related intellectual property rights. So Parliament adopted the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act of 2006,which defines as a trademark infringement the commercial use of words like games,2012 and London in proximity.
Such monomaniacal brand micromanagement points to another problem: the IOC has turned the Olympics into a commercial bonanza. In London,more than 250 miles of VIP traffic lanes are reserved not just for athletes and IOC luminaries but also for corporate sponsors. Michael R. Payne,a former marketing director for the committee,has called the Olympics the worlds longest commercial.
Most worrisome,perhaps,is that the IOC creates perverse incentives for security officials in host cities to overspend and to militarise public space.
Visitors to London,where the games are scheduled to run from July 27 to August 12,would be forgiven for thinking they had dropped in on a military hardware convention. Helicopters,fighter jets and bomb-disposal units will be at the ready. About 13,500 British military personnel will be on patrol 4,000 more than are currently serving in Afghanistan.
Let us be clear: the concern about ensuring a terror-free Olympics is tragically warranted. Yet there is such a thing as excess and surveillance and weaponry are not a panacea.
Security measures can also be counterproductive: London residents who learned that the Ministry of Defence was attaching missile launchers to the roofs of their apartment buildings cant be blamed for wondering if theyve unwillingly become a prime target for terrorists. And,symbolically,at a certain point it gets hard to square the image of the militarised state with the Olympic ideals of peace and understanding.
In these bleak economic times,the world could use a little athletic transcendence. Sadly,the arrogance and aloofness of the organisation behind the spectacle are all too ordinary.
Boykoff,an associate professor at Pacific University,is writing a book on the Olympics. Tomlinson is a professor at the University of Brighton.
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