The Games: Winning Without Medals

By Roger Rosenblatt

As if the answer were easy, Themistocles, when asked whether he would prefer to have been Achilles or Homer, replied: "Which would you rather be, a conqueror in the Olympic Games or the crier that proclaims who are the conquerors?" A navy man, Themistocles saw no honor in being out of things. He would not have understood the U.S. role of spectator to this year's Olympic Games, or how a country whose national pride has so often been hoisted in those Games could settle for the bleachers.

Right now, the U.S. feels none of that particular sort of pride. Instead many Americans, including those who would have been competing in Moscow, are wondering if what they are feeling is any sort of pride at all or merely the discomfort of having taken a difficult moral position that is beginning to feel a bit tight at the neck. After all, aren't those young men and women just playing games over there? Is the U.S. a spoilsport?

Were it not for the remarks of the presidents of the International Olympic Committee, the political significance of the Olympics would probably never be in question. Yet as recently as July 14, Lord Killanin opened a session of the I.O.C. by expressing his great fear for the future of the Games "if politicians continue to make use of sport for their own ends." Steady as the Olympic torch, that sort of mindlessness has been passed from I.O.C. president to I.O.C. president, from Avery Brundage to Killanin, and soon, most likely, to President-elect Juan Antonio Samaranch, who sounds a lot like his predecessors. All owe their conventional wisdom, if not their tone, to Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Games. Decreed Coubertin: "The essential thing in life is not conquering, but fighting well." The words are charming, and perhaps even true, but they have never applied to the Olympics.

Certainly, nothing in the ancient history of the Games supports the idea that they are apolitical. Brundage lamented that in ancient Greece wars were suspended for the Olympics, whereas today the Olympics are suspended for wars. In fact, the first Olympics were dry runs for wars. Once, in 364 B.C., the Eleians turned a dry run into the real McCoy and swooped down on the Pisates during the Games. They won. The modern marathon,"inspired by the tale of a soldier who ran 25 miles to report a victory, commemorates both politics and conquest. As for the glory of fighting well, one needs only to read Pindar on the ignominy of the losers.

The other old Olympics sham is that the Games foster international good will. If logic failed to destroy that idea, observation would do nicely, since the sight of mingling, embracing athletes at the close of the Games is characteristic of nothing in the world or in the Games themselves but momentary (and partly ceremonial) good nature. Observers of the sporting life, like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, had a dimmer view of the Games. Orwell called them "war minus the shooting." The connection with war has always been up front. Coubertin, who argued for French colonialism as ardently as he did for reviving the Olympics, admired the relationship between British colonialism and sports in the public schools. Every Etonian knows how Wellington is supposed to have explained Waterloo. Hitler, who had a way with brass tacks, said bluntly in Mein Kampf: Give me an athlete and I'll give you an army --which he did, to Austria, two years after the success of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Of course, "war minus the shooting" may be a way of justifying the Games, but that is something quite different from stating that the element of war is not present.

Not that anyone needs to reach for the ancients, or for theories, to connect the Olympics and politics. A casual scanning of events in the modern Games shows that for every example of exchanged T shirts and kisses among competing nations there are a dozen instances of international cheating, needling and foul play, all laced with as much nationalism as competitive nastiness. In 1908, British officials dragged the Italian marathoner Dorando Pietri over the finish line in an attempt to withhold victory from the American Johnny Hayes. The water polo match between the Soviet Union and Hungary in 1956 ended with a bloody-faced Hungarian in the pool. Boycotts have been threatened before, and two actually occurred: the African boycotts of 1972 and 1976. (Many Americans sought to boycott the 1936 Olympics, but Brundage prevailed, explaining Nazi anti-Semitism as a "religious dispute.") If hard evidence of the political character of the Moscow Games were needed, there are plenty of Soviet statements to draw on. The bestselling Handbook of Party Activists maintains that the decision to give the Games to Moscow "was convincing testimony to the general recognition of the historic importance and correctness of the foreign policy course of our country, of the enormous service of the Soviet Union in the struggle for peace."

Killanin and Brundage have always contended that the Games are contests among individuals, not nations. This is a patently preposterous claim, given the I.O.C. prohibition against athletes competing as individuals rather than as nationals of a specific country. Several countries that refused to lend their national stature to the opening ceremonies were nevertheless happy to be identified in the Games. The nuances grow tedious, the examples superfluous. Every country that has ever participated in the Olympic Games, ancient or modern, knows that the events have political analogues, effects and overtones, and that the host country always gains useful prestige. When nations as powerful and athletic as the U.S., Canada, West Germany and Japan stay out of the Games, the damage cannot fail to be political.

Still, even if the viewer could suspend politics, would it also be possible to see the Games purely as sport, without attaching any moral element to them? Deciphering one particular game, May Swenson wrote: "It's about/ the ball,/ the bat,/ and the mitt." Few others see sports as cleanly. Every golden age from the Greeks forward has made the connection between body and soul, between physical and moral education. The key to the connection is youth. The simple fact that athletes are young traditionally brings them closer to goodness, or, as the Romantics believed, to heaven itself. The demonstration of excellence in anything is implicitly moral. It can even seem supernatural. One need not be a sports fan to appreciate an element of unexpressed awe in athletic events, especially in the Olympic Games, which began as one sort of ritual and continue as another. All ritual suggests the presence of the sacred.

For Americans, the connection between morality and sport has never been in doubt. The interesting thing about Frank Merriwell was not simply that he won everything, but that he was perfect in every way (he settled strikes, wrote hit plays). Similarly, the disappointment in someone like Bruce Jenner is that he is merely perfect in one way, or rather in ten. The All-American Boy is first an athlete. Only in America could Shoeless Joe Jackson be considered tragic instead of pathetic; could an old man of the sea vow to be "worthy of the great DiMaggio"; or could national leaders make mad displays of their athleticism in order to prove how fit they are for their job. Courage, selfdiscipline, resourcefulness, will, stature, coolness under fire--all are terms that Americans like to associate with themselves and with their athletes. Even in these hard-boiled times, what American soul does not quiver in some monumental epiphany at Breaking Away or Bad News Bears or Rocky?

Yet what exactly is being quivered at: the presence of beauty, sublimity, God? Coubertin might have been dreaming to apply his idea of "fighting well" to the meaning of the Olympics, but he was right about attaching the general idea of struggle to virtue. That struggle is what people admire in sporting events, in the Olympic Games above all. They make an illogical leap from the virtue of the athlete to the virtue of the Games, and then, without a pause, to the virtue of the setting, the framework of the Games: hop, skip, jump. What those in the Moscow boycott are doing by taking themselves out of that process is to prevent symbolic, irrational connections from being made on their behalf. Conversely, they are insisting by their absence that the participating countries acknowledge frankly their implicit approval of the Soviets.

To put it harshly: the countries participating in the Moscow Olympics are symbolically abetting the Soviet takeover of Afghanistan. Those countries bear the burden, not the individual athletes. The other day Henry Marsh, a U.S. track star, who would have had a chance for a medal in the steeplechase, said: "How can you compete in a country which is killing--slaughtering--innocent people right next door? Personally it would have been hard for me to go to Moscow and still feel good about myself." Yet it would be much to ask of an individual athlete to defy his country's official decision and boycott on his own. That some athletes have done so is admirable, even remarkable, but the issue is no more an individual one than anything else in the Olympics. The onus sits squarely with the nations that voted to go, and they will have plenty of opportunity in the months ahead to decide if travel is broadening.

At the same time, it would be foolish to suggest that the symbolic importance of any one Olympics is vast and eternal. Every time the I.O.C. lofts one of its round-toned fatuities about the purity of the Olympic Games, there is an instant temptation to push the button and roar that the Games are the world's most significant political events. The Games have their significance, but they also come and go; the political advantages come and go; in the long run, even the champions come and go. No matter what Themistocles thought of Homer, no one would remember Achilles were it not for the heel. As for the possible collapse of the Olympics after Moscow, that would not be the worst thing either. The Games collapsed in 393 B.C. because someone (the Emperor Theodosius) held to a principle (that they were pagan), and neither sport nor the world came to an end in the 1,503-year hiatus.

What makes the boycott peculiarly tough on Americans is that so much of their history is tied to sports. The great period of American inventions, in the late 19th century, was also the era when organized sports came into their own, the one freeing time for the other. Since then, there has always been an explicit association of sports with the old success dream: every up-and-coming athlete a potential Horatio Alger hero. In some ways the modern history of the U.S. is a huge, complex athletic event; industries, immigrants and ideologies are continuously vying with one another for clear-cut victories. For capitalists, it is a special strain to be on the outs of a competition.

The strain is honorable. It would have been honorable had no other country joined the boycott of the Olympic Games. It would be honorable still if, by some measure, it were determined that the political damage done the Soviets was minimal. The essential thing in life, sometimes, is not conquering, but fighting well.

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