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London Olympic DMZ
Jul. 11th, 2012 04:47 pmWhen I was a kid, one of the events I used to get the most excited about was the Olympics. Every four years, the Summer and Winter games landed somewhere and sports that never got shown on television suddenly turned into marathon events that everyone got excited about. It reminded me of my dad talking about hockey in the 50s, when you'd walk down the street and a couple of people would be watching the game in a television in a store window and on the corner, a pedestrian would lean into the window of a parked cabbie to get the score from the radio broadcast he had on. Cynically nationalistic, sure, but there was always a great sense of belonging during Olympic years that wasn't around often; to be part of something that everyone else was too. I distinctly remember in grade three discussing the results of the 50m dash and struggling around the names of the finalists.
Growing up, I retained a lot of my core instinctive joy of the Olympics, but with each iteration, it gets less and less as the intellectual justification for it grows ever more bankrupt. The Olympic selection committee is hopelessly and obviously corrupt, the games which are meant to support health are dominated by McDonald's, Heineken, and Coke, and in the name of security, some of the worst restrictions of the rights of free speech, protest, and basic civil dignity have been imposed since WWII. At the centre of it all are athletes who in many cases live and train at subsistence levels because they are in a less popular sport or don't attract sponsorships, increasingly shutting out the ability to participate unless one has the independent means to pursue a career as an 'amateur' athlete. Public funds are funneled into these venues with breathtaking abandon, even when libraries and community centres are closing, and the greatest insult is that after the corporate sponsors and VIPs are taken care of, the only tickets that remain will cost astronomical prices. The UK military will deploy over 15,000 troops to support tens of thousands of police and private security, who have been given extensive powers to detain citizens with only a cursory blended command structure to provide proper oversight.
More and more, it seems less like London is hosting the Olympics as it does that the populace of London is having the Olympics happen to it, much like a destructive natural disaster. The parallels to Katrina are tempting; neighbourhoods being torn apart by the needs of the event, rapidly changing the culture of East London from what's been established for decades into a very different, more moneyed entity. The poor and minorities being forced out by forces beyond their control, forced further out with little support. A security structure given carte blanche to question and detain citizens for the thinnest of reasons, often administrated by poorly trained and inexperienced security no better trained than a mall cop.
What bothers me is the fact that the events themselves are going to be counterpointed with what will no doubt be regular abuses committed in its name. It would be nice to say that it's the sport that matters mentally, but absolution isn't that easy. The events have built this monstrous structure to support them, like a tiny hermit crab inside of a vast and weighty shell, which gets bigger and more cumbersome with each cycle. The 100m Freestyle finals will be the reason for a protester being locked inside a holding cell and left in his own urine and vomit following a beating. To watch the sublime speed of Usain Bolt blister a track, we will pay for it with a woman being sexually assaulted and then charged as part of a cover up. The excitement of the high dive comes at the price of massive overruns in cost, which will be equally out by the cutting of more services to Britons, even as the artificial surroundings around East London wither or become simply moneyed gentrified homes, no more accessible or connected with the people of the city than a plot of land on the moon.
Mark Perryman has some interesting ideas about re-imaging the Olympics to bring it away from the current morass in his new book; ideas like breaking up the events and spreading them out over multiple cities to more effectively use existing infrastructure, making the events more accessible to regular people, looking at decoupling the process of corporate and public funding by balancing out coverage and developing new media strategies, and many other methods. Which are interesting, but I just don't see it happening.
There's simply too much money tied up with the Olympics, and because so little of it flows to the athletes, it is a bonanza that they are unlikely to release. It offers unparalleled advertising and the host city's local, regional and federal political bosses a once in a lifetime chance to loot the public purse for every kind of earmark and incentive that they can think to deliver to their allies. In many ways, the Olympics represents a unique point where politics and business finds themselves able to act as anointed nobility, under the zeal of forced nationalism, where their worst excesses are seen as positive thinks to be celebrated, as opposed to hidden behind bland speeches and spokespersons.
I don't have a solution, mind you, just a sad and grim prediction about what is waiting for London and the rest of us when the five ring flag is flown and the flame is lit.
Growing up, I retained a lot of my core instinctive joy of the Olympics, but with each iteration, it gets less and less as the intellectual justification for it grows ever more bankrupt. The Olympic selection committee is hopelessly and obviously corrupt, the games which are meant to support health are dominated by McDonald's, Heineken, and Coke, and in the name of security, some of the worst restrictions of the rights of free speech, protest, and basic civil dignity have been imposed since WWII. At the centre of it all are athletes who in many cases live and train at subsistence levels because they are in a less popular sport or don't attract sponsorships, increasingly shutting out the ability to participate unless one has the independent means to pursue a career as an 'amateur' athlete. Public funds are funneled into these venues with breathtaking abandon, even when libraries and community centres are closing, and the greatest insult is that after the corporate sponsors and VIPs are taken care of, the only tickets that remain will cost astronomical prices. The UK military will deploy over 15,000 troops to support tens of thousands of police and private security, who have been given extensive powers to detain citizens with only a cursory blended command structure to provide proper oversight.
More and more, it seems less like London is hosting the Olympics as it does that the populace of London is having the Olympics happen to it, much like a destructive natural disaster. The parallels to Katrina are tempting; neighbourhoods being torn apart by the needs of the event, rapidly changing the culture of East London from what's been established for decades into a very different, more moneyed entity. The poor and minorities being forced out by forces beyond their control, forced further out with little support. A security structure given carte blanche to question and detain citizens for the thinnest of reasons, often administrated by poorly trained and inexperienced security no better trained than a mall cop.
What bothers me is the fact that the events themselves are going to be counterpointed with what will no doubt be regular abuses committed in its name. It would be nice to say that it's the sport that matters mentally, but absolution isn't that easy. The events have built this monstrous structure to support them, like a tiny hermit crab inside of a vast and weighty shell, which gets bigger and more cumbersome with each cycle. The 100m Freestyle finals will be the reason for a protester being locked inside a holding cell and left in his own urine and vomit following a beating. To watch the sublime speed of Usain Bolt blister a track, we will pay for it with a woman being sexually assaulted and then charged as part of a cover up. The excitement of the high dive comes at the price of massive overruns in cost, which will be equally out by the cutting of more services to Britons, even as the artificial surroundings around East London wither or become simply moneyed gentrified homes, no more accessible or connected with the people of the city than a plot of land on the moon.
Mark Perryman has some interesting ideas about re-imaging the Olympics to bring it away from the current morass in his new book; ideas like breaking up the events and spreading them out over multiple cities to more effectively use existing infrastructure, making the events more accessible to regular people, looking at decoupling the process of corporate and public funding by balancing out coverage and developing new media strategies, and many other methods. Which are interesting, but I just don't see it happening.
There's simply too much money tied up with the Olympics, and because so little of it flows to the athletes, it is a bonanza that they are unlikely to release. It offers unparalleled advertising and the host city's local, regional and federal political bosses a once in a lifetime chance to loot the public purse for every kind of earmark and incentive that they can think to deliver to their allies. In many ways, the Olympics represents a unique point where politics and business finds themselves able to act as anointed nobility, under the zeal of forced nationalism, where their worst excesses are seen as positive thinks to be celebrated, as opposed to hidden behind bland speeches and spokespersons.
I don't have a solution, mind you, just a sad and grim prediction about what is waiting for London and the rest of us when the five ring flag is flown and the flame is lit.
