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This quote came from American skeleton rider John Daly, who was in line for a medal until his final run, when this rather basic error happened at the start and his medal chances were shot. I was looking for a quote which would best sum up the Winter Olympics from the perspective of IN PLAY LOSE. There is your winner right there.
That was a shocking mistake in a
Darn you Canadians! We are supposed to be friends!
The best way to think of the Winter Olympics is to start with Sayre’s Law, and extrapolate from there. Sayre’s Law states, in essence, that so much is made by so few over so little. There may be little to fight over, but what there is worth fighting over wildly increases in magnitude. In the case of every single sport that’s been played out in Sochi over the past couple of weeks, the Winter Olympic Games are the only event that matters. Seriously, no one cares if you win your 4th consecutive World Luge Championship in Igls, Austria, or prevail in a World Cup speed skating event in Almaty, Kazakhstan. No one cares. And everyone in the competition knows that, of course. The Olympics is what athletes dream of winning and what they prepare for, and the result comes to define their career.
And for those of us on the sidelines, looking at the Winter Olympics in total and seeing bombast and largesse, it’s easy to forget that. Most Winter Olympians toil in obscurity and do it primarily because they love what they do so much. The Olympics offer a stage they never get otherwise. And this giant spectacle is composed of a great many small sports. Very small sports, in the grand scheme of things. The Sochi Olympics saw several 6- and 7-time Olympians in their 40s winning medals. Their dedication is quite impressive and commendable, but the fact is that 40-somethings winning medals in their 7th Olympics does speak, to some extent, to a lack of a deep talent pool. The sports are generally desperate for growth in all areas: competitors, spectators, opportunities, facilities and finances.
When so much gets made of so little, the one event that can legitimately be labeled as SO MUCH will often bring out the worst in people. Part of why acts of class and sportsmanship such as this and this are heralded whey they occur in the Olympics is that they do not happen nearly as often as they should. You usually see a lot of bad behaviour associated with the Olympics. Sochi was surprisingly absent of antics, however. There were only a handful of doping cases, most of which were minor infractions and one of which, involving Swedish hockey player Nicklas Backstrom, seemed a bit strange and definitely came at a particularly bad time. I also heard a lot less whining than is the norm. This was a fairly well-behaved Olympics, which is something of a disappointment. There was, however, some juicy snippets of infighting and the periodic bursts of incompetence to keep things interesting, and the conditions were often unideal, leading to some additional challenges for the competitors. (The alpine skiing courses all looked brutally hard to begin with, and the icky snow made it worse, but it’s not like skiers are unused to wild and weird weather swings.) And mercifully, there were none of the sorts of large political distractions which seemed possible, and even likely, at times during the run-up to the Games. Putin et. al pulled it off, in the end. But at what cost? Well, we will get to that in a bit ...
The best way to sum up these Olympics from a North American point of view is that the Americans like going down hills in the snow and the Canadians like going across ice. As has been the case since the Winter Olympics started ‘modernizing,’ the North Americans were the big beneficiaries of all of the so-called ‘extreme’ sports – crazy stuff you do on skis and snowboards that is stunning to watch done well and terrifying to watch done badly. There was probably more whining in the snowboard events than in any others, which was very unbecoming of a supposedly mellow group that likes to hang out and shred and preach camaraderie. Yes, the halfpipe sucked, but it sucked for everyone equally, and conditions for the entire snow portion of the games were a little problematic. (This is what happens when you try to have winter sports in what’s basically a Mediterranean climate.) And there was a wee bit too much schadenfreude going on when Shaun White failed to medal. He has set himself up for that, of course, as he has always been entirely driven and focused upon winning this event, and also promoting himself in process – notions which supposedly clash with the ‘ethos’ of snowboarding. But as soon as you set up a pinnacle like the Olympics, guys and gals are going to be singly-minded to win it. It was inevitable a Shaun White would come to exist. And yeah, White made something of a dick move by pulling out of the slopestyle at the last minute – in taking a spot on the team in an event his competitors say he had no intention of doing, he had cost a spot on the Olympic team for another athlete – but the resentment of White seemed based upon jealousy more than anything else, since he makes $15m a year and everyone else is scrambling for table scraps. Bottom line is the guy has done more to make the sport relevant than any other person, but killing your idols has always been somewhat necessary, I suppose.
I still think the ‘extremists’ are out of their minds, but damn, some of the stuff they do is just phenomenal. The slopestyle event became a favourite of mine almost immediately, because the tricks and the twists and the flips were so jawdroppingly awesome to watch. At first, I thought it was weird that the slopestyle events had no actual criteria for judging – the judges simply awarded a score from 1-100 based upon the impression they got from the competitor’s run. But in hindsight, there is something refreshing about a sport whose judges just say, “we make stuff up.” At least they are honest about it. Judged sports have always bothered me in that the results are so easily manipulated. From a layman’s perspective, I watch the athletes and see the scores and it is impossible to understand why they are being given the scores they are given. It seems somewhat superfluous to have judges in ski jumping, since it pretty much follows form that if you fly the farthest, you get the most style points from the judges. (And by the way, who gets the ‘babes’ or the ‘dudes’ more than the ski jumpers? I mean, seriously here, THESE PEOPLE ARE FLYING! I saw people doing this in person while I lived in Steamboat Springs, where they have a so-called ‘normal’ hill, as opposed to a ‘complete lunatic’ hill. It is AMAZING.)
And it wouldn’t be an Olympics without a figure skating judging controversy, of course. I don’t know that much about the sport, but most of the people I know who do know something about the sport seemed to think the Russians were getting a few too many breaks from the judges. Far too many American sports media members that I read sort of missed the point in making arguments that it is natural for the home team to get the breaks. For one, this is not some home-and-home in the NBA. It’s not like there is another Olympics next week in which the breaks and the calls will even out. Since the event happens so infrequently, you can understand why athletes feel more cheated than the norm. And secondly, as I mentioned in my previous Olympic blog, cheating in the Olympics involved a lot of bureaucractic maneuvering over the years, nations getting judges and officials and administrators in positions to affect outcomes, which they would then do at the expense of home nations. Eastern Bloc judges were going with their guy whether the games were in Moscow or Munich or Montréal, Sapporo or Squaw Valley or Sarajevo. (And vice versa, I should add, but the Western judges were often simply outnumbered, having failed to play this particular political game well.) I have heard the term SWR bandied about to explain some curious figure skating results in Sochi. That term didn’t come from nowhere. (I’ll let you figure out what it means.) I think it is too simplistic to look at a judging panel, see their nationalities and assume who is ‘voting’ for whom – people were quick to assume judges from Estonia and Slovakia were tabbing Russians, and I feel pretty comfortable in saying Russians aren’t on the Best Dressed lists in either of those two countries. But we’ve been conditioned, after watching years of bogus results in the sport, to immediately go looking for conspiracies. The French sport daily L'Equipe made some news by breaking a story early on that the Americans and Russians had some sort of secret deal in place to help each other’s nations at the judging podium at the expense of those darn Canadians, a notion that seems ludicrous given the long history of mistrust and animosity between the two nations in the Olympic arena (nevermind in far larger and more important arenas). If anything, it was most likely a planted story intended to try to knock some skaters off their games, a curious sort of tact playing upon the worst that the sport has to offer.
But in the case of figure skating, the politics are both the best and the worst the sport has to offer. We expect it to be corrupt and sleazy and shambolic by now. The drama is one of the most compelling acts within the sport. The ISU has attempted, since the judging scandal of Salt Lake City in 2002, to change the judging system by doing such things as making the judges votes a secret. How a sport supposedly becomes more transparent by becoming more opaque is beyond me, but this is the same governing body that allowed the wife of the Russian skating federation president to be a judge during the Sochi Olympics. (No, there is no potential for conflict of interest there or anything. None whatsoever.) They’ve attempted to create a scoring system in figure skating much like that in an equally politically motivated sport, gymnastics, which is based upon start values and rewarding skaters for elements. The problem with this is that the benefits of attempting a trick far outweigh the penalties for not doing it very well. Diving has degree of difficulty as a multiplier, but you still have to do the dive right. 0 x 3.2 is a whole lot of zero. Instead, figure skating has start values – basically, one routine is worth more than another before it even begins. It just seems weird to me that the field is not all beginning at the same starting line. (The only sport I know of where you start with a handicap is polo, but at least there the better team starts with the deficit and has to play catch up.) It seems to me that if you are going to try and do something on the ice, no matter the value, you had damn well better do it right. But in figure skating, it’s almost as if you’re getting points for falling down.
It certainly seemed that way watching the men skate, which produced more carnage than short track speed skating. Guys were falling down everywhere. Yuzuru Hanyu of Japan fell twice during his long programme, and this is the guy that won the event. And I have no doubt that what he was doing was damn near impossibly hard for 99.999999% of humanity, but guys winning gold medals in the Olympics shouldn’t be falling on their asses twice. That cheapens the sport, which is intended, in part, to be a presentation of both skill and grace. (The failure of Patrick Chan to capitalize on his Japanese rival making so many errors produced the greatest tweet of the Olympics from Canadian figure skater Joannie Rochette. For our English speaking audience: “He had the gold on a silver platter. He took the platter.”) The judging system creates a fundamental disconnect – no one knows what they are watching, so no one really knows who is actually winning. Hell, the athletes do not even understand the system. The sport would probably be better served with a scoring system that was genuinely transparent and made some sense, but I am not sure the governing body of the sport wants it that way, to be honest. Without all the controversy, there wouldn’t be nearly as much interest. Trust me, they’re well aware of that fact.
[EDIT: speaking of figure skating, a watchful reader has pointed me to a jewel of an online rant posted by American skater Jeremy Abbott in the wake of his Sochi performance, which was notable for his terrible, and somewhat frightening, fall in the short programme, which is something he has done before in big competitions. He does not much care for the ‘choker’ label he has been saddled with:
“I just want to put my middle finger in the air and say a big ‘F-you’ to everyone who has ever said that to me because they’ve never stood in my shoes and they’ve never had to do what I’ve had to do. Nobody has to stand center ice in front of a million people and put an entire career on the line for eight minutes of their life when they’ve been doing it for 20-some years. And if you think that that’s not hard, then you’re a damn idiot.”
Well, it is true that I have never stood in his shoes (or skates, for that matter). I have never had to face that pressure. I think what he attempted to do is incredibly hard. And I also think that quite a few of the other competitors put in the same time and efforts, faced the same pressures, and DID NOT wind up faceplanting repeatedly on the biggest stage. But I appreciate the defiance. If you are going to go down, you might as well do it swinging.]
I cannot say that I thought the Russians were getting that many breaks from the judges (some others sure thought so, and in more than one instance), but Russia experienced the usual home bounce on their way to capturing a total of 33 medals. The Russians had a terrible go of it in Vancouver in 2010, but they were certain to rebound. Along with some natural home field advantages came a few built-in ones – the Russian
In the case of Wild, it was a coming together of interesting circumstances. He married a Russian, and even though he was near the top of his game, it was a game no one at the U.S. Ski Federation cared about any more, as they eliminated his program – which, in hindsight, looks kind of dumb, now doesn’t it? (And this aptly-titled article does well to express what it’s like when you lose your aegis.) The lack of greater outside financing structures, combined with the hierarchical structure of the Olympics – basically one giant collection of sports federations – makes it such that the federations essentially control the purse strings, which means they have all the power to make or break the career of an athlete. And being this good at anything does not come cheaply. Wild really had no other choice if he wanted to continue to hone his craft than to seek another nation, and the Russians were more than happy to oblige. Wild will reportedly earn $250,000 from the Russian government for each of his gold medals, a windfall impossible to achieve in the sport in any other way. Choosing to pursue success in one of these sports is rarely rewarding, and often maddeningly disappointing. It is part of what makes the event so appealing to me, being someone who truly appreciates the efforts of the athletes and someone who also sympathizes with the failures (and the crushing consequences of failure.)
As for the Korean speed skater I mentioned above, Victor Ahn – formerly known as Ahn Hyun-Soo – he won three gold medals in Turin in 2006, got hurt, missed the 2010 games, got into a spat with the Korean Skating Union, was told he was no longer in their national team plans, and went out and actively offered his services to another country, including the U.S. (Ahn was also a part of this melee in Salt Lake City, which is probably the signature moment in the history of short track speed skating and also the greatest tortoise-and-hare moment in all of sports. Apparently Aussies have made gold medalist Steven Bradbury part of the language as a result of that, which is definitely a badge of honour.) Come 2014, Ahn turns up wearing Russian colours, as does a promising Ukrainian skater as well, and suddenly the nation becomes a short track speed skating power – although some of Ahn’s competitors at the European Championships in Dresden were not too happy to see him there:
The LOSE sees nothing wrong with this sort of recruitment, by the way, believing that sport mirrors life and that, in life, all people should have the freedom to move wherever they wish for whatever reason they wish. To the people in Korea, Ahn turning into a speed skating mercenary was more a condemnation of the Korean skating federation than it was of him. It just seemed a little odd that Ahn actually signed a contract to be a Russian, complete with an apartment in Moscow and a coaching job when he retires. Sort of a strange deal, but we live in strange times.
As for the angry Dutchman in the photo above, Sjinkie Knegt, he also medaled in Sochi in short track, and that is about the last angry picture of a Dutchman on skates you are going to see for years, because the Dutch dominated the ice the way the Dream Team opens a can of whoopass on Angola. The Dutch won 23 of the 36 medals doled out in speed skating on the long oval. It was a surprise but it probably shouldn’t be, given the rabid interest in the sport in the Netherlands (which is backed up by an infrastructure to match no other). The real surprise may be that full-fledged Dutch dominance of speed skating hadn’t happened sooner. The supposedly second-best team of speed skaters on the planet, meanwhile, were another story entirely. In fact, the U.S. speed skaters pretty much showed everything that is wrong about the Winter Olympics over the course of two weeks. So, of course, this was far more interesting to me than anything else going on in Sochi.
The U.S. won zero medals in a sport where it has won more than any other in Olympic history. Not only did they win zero medals, but they were never even close. The defending Olympic champions and World Record holders composing the American team all looked like they were skating through wet cement. What the hell was going on? And with the bad results, of course, comes a pipeline of sludge spewing forth and spilling everywhere, most of which centered on the racing suits they wore, which is a vital piece of equipment in the sport.
The Americans showed up in Sochi wearing shiny new suits from Under Armour, the American federation’s major corporate backer. Under Armour set forth with Lockheed in 2011 to create the sickest, slickest racing suit in history, which they presented to the American skating team six weeks before the Olympics, claiming they were state-of-the-art threads. The problem being, of course, that they had not tested the suits in any sort of competition, and this report from the Associated Press pretty much shows where everyone’s head was. It would appear that secrecy was far more important than anything else, fearing that some other nation (read: the Dutch) would get their hands on this secret technology and exploit it for themselves.
Read this graf from that AP story again:
For the men’s 1,000 on Wednesday, one U.S. skater — Haley wouldn’t say who — skated in a slightly different version of the new suit, essentially for testing purposes. There was no significant improvement in the time. Davis finished eighth, ending his bid to become the first male speedskater to win the same event three straight times.
Wait a minute. Why are you testing the suit at the Olympics? Don’t you think you should’ve done this, like, at one of those World Cup races the Americans kicked ass in all year, or maybe at some domestic dog-and-pony show of a competition you just throw together in Salt Lake City or Milwaukee ostensibly to give the suits a go? If Under Armour is going to put this much time and money into developing a suit, they could certainly put up a little more scratch for such an enterprise. You can test all you want on a mannequin in a wind tunnel, but mannequins don’t skate. Humans do! And humans have to like the feel and performance and respond positively. Why was this such a difficult concept to grasp? This sort of hubris seems akin to a Hollywood production company that thinks all along they are making a great film, instead of actually going about making one.
Indeed, some of the design ideas Under Armour came up with were apparently thought of, tried, and deemed to be bad ideas by Dutch designers in the past. The other athletes were baffled that the Americans would show up with new outfits that had no proven ability to help the skaters. And while blaming the racing suits may seem like a ready-made excuse for failure, there is probably something to it if an entire team of world-class skaters suddenly, collectively seems to forget how to skate.
U.S. head coach Ryan Shimabukuro then offered up this gem of a defense when asked about the racing suit controversy: “I’m not going to criticize them (Under Armour), even if I was allowed to. They’re a great partner. And it’d be stupid to criticize a company that has backed us completely.” Aah, so let me if I have this straight: the company who signs your paycheques apparently has carte blanche to fuck everything up for your skaters in the most importance races of their lives. OK, got it. When guys like this have your back, the worst is behind you.
Seriously, if you are an American speed skater, how do you not feel like you got sold out here? This is the biggest event of your life, and you are done in, in part, by a bunch of empty suits of the pinstripe variety who clearly didn’t have your best interests at heart? (Apparently, some of the skaters do feel that way.) The team quickly shifted to different racing suits, but by that point the distractions were immense and morale was non-existent. Good luck trying to compete at that point. And then came some finger pointing about training regimens – why is a team prepping on a rock-hard outdoor surface in the Italian Alps for a competition indoors at sea level, where the ice will be soft? – and other administrative bickering, and the whole thing was revealed to be a big clusterfuck.
Now, you can understand the need to partner up with big corporate dollars. Speed skating in the U.S. is a minor sport. The American success at it over the history of the Olympics has been somewhat remarkable, in fact, given that the sport has almost entirely been a rugged and determined individualistic pursuit with little financial support or windfall. (Especially considering the spawn of state sports systems American athletes found themselves facing for decades.) But clearly, some people at US Speedskating need to get their priorities straight. Then again, they promptly reupped with Under Armour, so one wonders if they really get it. Under Armour is now promising to underwrite US Speedskating for another 8 years, which is about how long it is likely to take to undo all the damage from this debacle. It is unfortunate, since it is a sport which has never been appreciated in this country to the extent it should. The rewards have not been in keeping with the results. It is a powerful and beautiful sport to see done well, even if the actual competitions seem a bit dull to me, as they are going 2-by-2 and just racing the clock instead of each other. Perhaps my Dutch relatives can explain to me the appeal from the live spectator standpoint. I assume there is beer involved. Actually, given that the Dutch are famous for throwing the best parties at the Olympics, I am certain there is beer involved, and probably a lot of vodka this year as well, since this was going on in Russia.
And nothing drove the Russians to drink more than their hockey team. The Russians had a big Olympics, but since they lost in hockey, they probably do not care very much. That really was the only medal that country, as a whole, cared about. But I looked at that roster full of a few too many KHLers and wondered what was going on. The shootout loss to the U.S. in the prelims was a great game and a memorable one, but my thought when I watched it was, “you know what? The U.S. is better than they are. They should win this game. They have better players and they play together better as a team. There is no way that Russian team is winning a gold.”
And the U.S., of course, wound up on the bitter end of defeats to those damn Canadians on both the men’s and women’s sides. The women’s gold medal game was excruciating, frustrating, fluky and somewhat incomprehensible. Blowing a 2-goal lead in the last 3½ minutes seems like it should be classified as a choke, but it did not really look or feel like a choke. And it did not surprise me too much that the U.S. men phoned it in during the bronze medal game after their 1-0 loss to the Canadians in the semis. For all intents and purposes, that semifinal with Canada was their gold medal game. After losing it, the players found no collective value in coming in third. And I can certainly understand that. I have played in consolation games at tournaments before. They suck. You lost the game that really mattered. You do not care. Nobody cares. Whomever cares the least in the consolation game winds up losing. Winning a medal of any sort mattered a lot more to the Finns than it did to the Americans, which I think is actually in keeping with the nature of the tournament. For the North American players, participating in the Olympics is a big deal, but it is an even bigger deal to the Europeans.
The NHL periodically threatens to pull its players out of the Winter Olympics, but the players always block it in the CBA. NHL owners do not like the Olympics, basically, because they do not make any money off of it. Whatever other reasons they offer up are bullshit:
• Other leagues don’t take two weeks off in the middle of season.
Well, actually, pretty much every soccer league other than the EPL does that in the dead of winter, and it has no ill effect. It’s not like they cancel the games – they just get shuffled around a bit.
• There’s the greater risk of injury.
Well, there is always the risk of injury every time you step on the ice, but the risk is no different whether you are playing at the Olympics in Sochi or playing some pre-season slugfest in Saskatoon. (Honestly, injury is probably more likely in the latter.) Furthermore, having two weeks off during the season likely does wonders for healing injuries to the rank and file players who aren’t playing in the Olympics.
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. The Olympics should be free P.R. for the NHL, because any Olympic game involving two of the élite national teams in the sport showcases the game being played at the highest level, but the NHL screws it up, of course. The NHL has always had this curious bent to it, this strange notion that the needs of the marginal outweigh the needs of the skilled. The league ultimately doesn’t like the fact that so many new Olympic-made hockey fans then tune in for some mid-season drudgery between Columbus and Phoenix and are disappointed by the sorry product they see. The league wants to trot out some World Cup of Hockey concept again, so we can watch a guys who aren’t in game shape skating around in September. I hope the players continue to push back on this, because the Olympics really do matter to them. 1980 ultimately taught everyone who plays the game of hockey, on both sides of the Atlantic, just how magical and important the game can be. So long as memories of 1980 in Lake Placid and 2010 in Vancouver are still in players’ psyches, I suspect the NHL will be sending reps to Winter Olympics. I hope so, anyway. It would be a shame if that were discontinued. What would all of my Canadian friends fixate upon and obsess over at that point?
I kid, but I must also give props. The LOSE is a friend to all Canadians – I speak excellent Canadian, I have been to Tim Hortons more than once, I love poutine, and I have engaged in a uniquely British Columbia form of self-torture for 30+ years by permitting the Vancouver Canucks to get my hopes up. I must now give it up to my many good friends living in this continent’s cool upstairs apartment for their national team’s two victories in hockey in Sochi. Well done. But I have to say though, I cannot for the life of me understand their national fascination with curling. They say it is ‘chess on ice.’ I say it is shuffleboard on ice, and my interest in shuffleboard will only ever materialize if I am on board a cruise to the Caribbean. But being a dutiful correspondent, I made it a point to watch a little of every sport offered in the Winter Olympics. I tried to watch curling with an open mind and was completely baffled at what I was watching, as baffled as I have ever been watching any sport. Apparently this is bad if you are the yellow team:
The Americans were the yellows and they gave up a 7 here, which is really bad. I asked my assorted Canadian correspondents about this and they said it was the result of extremely bad curling. We apparently suck at curling in this country. I must be honest here, I am not that concerned about our lack of curling prowess.
Americans won 28 medals in Sochi, down from 37 in Vancouver, which really wasn’t that bad. It’s just that some of the name athletes people knew of – the Shaun Whites and the Shani Davises and the whole concept of the U.S. women’s figure skater – didn’t manage to win. Those names and/or concepts are somewhat familiar to people who watched four years earlier. We collectively do not know anything about skeletons and bobsleds and slopestyle skiers. The American media coverage necessarily gravitates towards that which is familiar, but every athlete reaches a point where they are past their prime. Given the spots in their respective careers, skiers Bode Miller and Julia Mancuso achieved quite a bit in winning medals, but the alpine ski team was perceived as somehow struggling early on, simply because the medals won in Sochi did not match the colours of medals won in Olympics past. The real stars of contemporary American skiing, Ted Ligety and Mikaela Shiffrin, sort of got pushed to the back burner, even though they both completely dominated their events. In the case of the 18-year-old Shiffrin, she will almost certainly be the #1 American Olympic poster child four years from now, but considering she came out and said her goal was to win five gold medals in Pyeongchang, she is not exactly shying away from the limelight.
And anyone who thinks American media is overly jingoistic and American-centric should get out of the bubble and watch some feeds from other nations. It is just as jingoistic and nationalistic, and sometimes even moreso. And people who complain about nationalistic coverage of the event miss the point. The connection a viewer has to an athlete from the same nation is far more likely to be based on being from the same place than it is from sharing interest or ability in the same sport. If we were all truly interested in biathlon as an event, we would have better biathletes in this country. Amazingly, we are not any good at that sport, given that two components of the sport – snow and guns – are things we have in abundance. Whenever you miss a shot in biathlon, you have to go over to a penalty course and essentially ski a lap of shame. It seems like you could liven up the event by having a gallery that boos and heckles the competitors when this occurs ... but then again, the competitors have guns are are not in a good mood at that point, so maybe that is not a good ideal after all ...
The LOSE was impressed with the Sochi games, in the end. The organizers somehow pulled it off. It does not change the fact, however, that I am staggered by the costs. $51,000,000,000 for all of that, a large amount of it almost certain ended up being poured down ratholes of corruption and inefficiency. Now, I can see some of the bigger picture issues at play here, some of which get lost from time to time. Putin wanted to present a showcase for the reimagined Russia, make the case that it is back as a global player. Putin also wanted to take this opportunity to transform Sochi into a major resort destination. And a good way to raise your mid-sized city profile is through sport. This has been shown to be successful in places like Indianapolis. Sochi already has a Formula 1 race planned for 2014, and the Olympic Stadium will be used during the 2018 World Cup, as well as serve as the sort of year-round football grounds and training facility the Russian national team has always desperately needed. All of those sorts of efforts will prove to be useful in the long run. Sochi does seem primed to reap some longer-term benefits.
That being said ... $51,000,000,000 for all of that? That figure is absolutely staggering. And while a good number of those sports facilities will be salvagable and serviceable from hereon, not all of them will be much use. (Speed skating ovals are particularly large white elephants – the buildings are cavernous, and the participants have very little long-term use for a facility such as the Sochi oval for training, as it is a low-altitude venue where the ice can easily turn into a slurpee.) And gussying up the city for a couple of weeks doesn’t make all of the other problems go away, of course. The Olympics are often rather naïvely viewed by activists as an opportunity to bring awareness to their particular issues and/or grievances, but once the Olympic flame is extinguished, the world turns it’s collective interests elsewhere. All which became familiar to us for a couple weeks disappears again into the woodworks.
And for a great number of the athletes, of course, a great deal of soul-searching goes on when the games are over. Is it worth it to carry on? Is it worth it to still be broke, to be perpetually injured, to be constantly at the whims of dumb politicos, to be spending too much time looking for funding and not enough time working on their game? One of the more interesting phenomena I noticed throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s was the number of leftover East German athletes who were still participating in the Olympics for a unified German team long after the country which had produced them had ceased to exist. A lot of them seemed to be continuing on (and doing so quite successfully) in part because they had no idea what else they would do. Sport was what they knew. They were, in a sense, bred to do it. I certainly admire their dedication, as I have never been dedicated enough to accomplish anything, but it also seemed to be tinged with an unintended hint of pathos. Winning the gold medal may be the crowning achievement, but what is ultimately the true value of spending a lifetime pursuing a sport and never achieving it, that dream having turned out to be made of fool’s gold? I suspect it is a stunningly empty feeling, one which would take quite a long time – maybe even a lifetime – to overcome.
I am not really sure, and it is easy not even to think about that kind of thing once the spectacle is over and the games go away and the bulk of the athletes disappear again into obscurity. But every time the Olympics come around, I am certainly going to watch. It is the most compelling, exciting, crushing, and occasionally tragic theatre piece we have ever invented on this planet. It’s irritating that a group as smug and selfish as the IOC knows this, of course, but for all the excess and the swindling and politics and bad behaviour and cronyism in the run-up to the games, those who participate in the games continue to save the IOC from themselves, and make the event impossible to ignore.
