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July 18, 2008
Carrying the torch into Beijing
The Olympics have always had doping, political and other problems surrounding them.
EUGENE KAELLIS
Questioned about the appropriateness of the capital of the People's Republic of China as the site for the 2008 Summer Games, Aug. 8-24, International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Dr. Jacques Rogge, insisted that, in spite of China's record on civil liberties, the Games "would promote social evolution. "They are not political," he maintained, using the same language as did Avery Brundage, officiating over the 1936 Games in Nazi Germany. The prospective Olympic athletes, of course, oppose a boycott. Is the analogy to the 1936 Olympics fair?
"Not political" has become a useful cliché affecting our trade and cultural ties with countries whose governments commit human rights violations. It may be an exaggeration to compare the Beijing Olympics with the Nazi Games, but, for members of Falun Gong, Tibetans, political dissidents, feminists, racial and ethnic groups in China, the comparison is not far-fetched.
In the same month as the Rogge interview, it was revealed that the Chinese were painting the grass green in Beijing and that they were training Olympic hostesses – to qualify, women not only had to be Han (the major ethnicity-race of Chinese), but they had to conform to detailed and strict measurable racial and gender facial and body dimensions and appearance. It also became known that a Chinese person who had collected 10,000 signatures opposing the government's land expropriations was put in jail. News is continually filtering out of the People's Republic of China (PRC) that demonstrates miserable working conditions, a very high level of industrial accidents, the major use of capital punishment, enormous discrepancies between the wealthy and the poor, and heavy air and water pollution.
As a result of the Chinese government's policies and actions, several world leaders have decided that they will boycott the opening ceremonies of the Games as an act of protest. As well, Steven Spielberg made the news when he quit as the Beijing Olympics' artistic director, expressing his disapproval of the continued military assistance of the PRC to Sudan, abetting the genocide in Darfur.
Nobody knows with certainty why the Olympic Games began. They started about 3,000 years ago and thereafter ran regularly every four years. That Mt. Olympus, the dwelling of the gods, was the games' site, indicates that they were sacred in origin, which is why they were discontinued in 394 CE by a Christian emperor who saw them as a relic of paganism. They did not resume until 1896, when, largely at the instigation of French Baron de Coubertin, they were re-started in Athens and, except for interruptions by the two world wars, have since continued. The number of participating athletes, the kinds of sports and the countries supplying the teams of athletes has grown considerably, while some sports, like chariot-racing, were dropped.
The Winter Olympics, of decidedly un-Greek heritage, started in 1924. In 1928, women, who, in the ancient Games were, on pain of death, kept from being even spectators, were allowed to participate in small numbers of selected sports.
For the ancient games, contestants had to train for at least four months. The summer heat and the Greek delight in the human body underlay the rule that athletes, anointed with oil, performed nude. This was a problem for Jewish participants, alleged to have competed in Olympus but more likely in the Greek games in Alexandria. We do know that they "de-circumcised" themselves, using a long and painful process of stretching their penile skin with attached weights.
What is perhaps most interesting about the ancient games is that they exhibited precisely the same problems the modern Games experience. Although athletes were supposed to compete as individuals, they were trained and subsidized by city-state coffers, wealthy contributors and, today, by their respective countries. And, would you believe it, athletes also took performance-enhancing herbs! There apparently were no rules about this.
Drugging continues to be one of the Games' biggest problems and provides major news stories. The full extent of this problem may never be known in amateur and professional play because, in the modern Games, testing is done only on the winning athletes, which means if a contestant, though drugged, is not a medal winner, his or her doping use may never be known. Athletes taking steroids usually administer their last dose in time for the hormone and its breakdown products to be flushed out of their systems before the competition. Sometimes, they miscalculate, as in the case of Canada's disgraced Ben Johnson, "the fastest man in the world," in the 1988 Seoul Games.
There have been many demands for the International Olympic Committee to do random testing of athletes at unstated intervals, but so far these calls have been resisted, as they have been in professional sports. We may never know who among top-flight athletes, amateur or professional, is doped. The rewards to successful athletes in salaries and in product endorsement are so tempting that participants are willing to the risk heart and circulatory problems, infertility, atrophy of the testes and, in women, masculinizing effects of steroids. The last has made gender confirmation necessary, at least once with surprising results. High doses of human growth hormone, another favorite performance-enhancing substance, in adults can cause joint problems and disproportionate growth, resulting in a "Hulk" appearance, with huge bones, larger jaws with separated teeth, heavy brows and chins.
Some doping methods are very hard to detect, especially those that increase the amount of oxygen-carrying red blood cells by using a hormone, erythropoietin, or simply by injecting the athletes' own previously stored red blood cells and by saturating the body with oxygen just before the competition. All sports, amateur and professional, have become a cat and mouse game between endocrinologists, physiologists and pharmacologists on the one hand, devising ways of improving performance, and analytical chemists, on the other, looking for evidence.
For Jews, the most significant Olympics were the Winter Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and the Summer Games in Berlin, both in 1936, and the 1972 Munich Games.
Although the decision to hold the 1936 Games in Germany was made by the IOC in 1930, before the Nazis came to power, by the time they were scheduled, the infamous Nuremberg decrees, defining who was a Jew and depriving Jews of all elementary civic and personal rights, were in force. A vigorous boycott movement, primarily in the United States and, to a lesser degree in Britain, failed largely because Brundage, the IOC president, fought it and because someone who could have tipped the scales, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, did not take a public position. From all indications, a boycott could have significantly hurt the new Nazi regime. The holding of the games in Berlin gave Hitler and the Nazis a great deal of favorable publicity.
The Nazis employed their usual lies and deceptions to soften their image, ordering anti-Jewish signs removed from Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Anti-Jewish graffiti and signs were removed, unburned but forbidden books were placed back on library shelves, "degenerate" paintings were hung on museum walls and jazz was allowed (but not performed by blacks). In general, suppression, militarism, nationalism and violent racism were hidden. The efforts of dissimulation worked with the IOC and, to a somewhat lesser degree, with journalists.
Jewish athletes nonetheless won 21 medals, five gold, at the Berlin Olympics. In the Winter Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Jews won 16 medals, eight gold. Paul Yogi Mayer, an athlete himself and an escapee from Nazi Germany, has thoroughly investigated Jewish participation in the Olympics and has calculated that, beginning with the 1896 Olympics until 2000, there were 416 medals awarded to Jewish athletes, of whom 186 received the gold medal.
The most tragic Olympic Games were held in 1972 in Munich, when Palestinian terrorists attacked the Olympic Village building in which the Israeli team was housed and, taking the athletes hostage, demanded the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israel. Failing that, they tried taking off, with their prisoners, in a helicopter. When the police attacked, the terrorists blew themselves up. Eleven Israeli athletes, one policeman and five terrorists were killed. Over the months afterward, Mosad, the Israeli spy agency, tracked down some of the planners and killed them.
Eugene Kaellis is a retired academic and freelance writer living in New Westminster.
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