I’m tired of hearing liberal, academic sorts bitch and moan about the Olympics, which is precisely what I’ve been hearing for, oh, pretty much the past five weeks or so. It goes something like this:
OMG, the sports! I don’t even like sports!
OMG, I don’t even watch television, but it’s all that’s on television! (Did you get the part about how I’m so intellectual I don’t really watch TV?).
OMG, it’s all anyone can talk about! It’s even on NPR! (Notice that I listen to NPR; did you get that?)
OMG, it’s so commercial, political; so . . . athletic!
OMG, Who gives a shit? Not me!
I mean seriously: shut the fuck up. I have a PhD, too. I’m a professor, too. I honest to god know fuck all about most modern sports, and kind of don’t really give a shit. Too.
But this is the goddamned Olympics, and it’s not like you didn’t know they were coming. It’s not like they’ve ever been completely apolitical, either in antiquity, and or now. For example, the failure of truce during the stephanetic games is well documented.
And commercial? Yes, they were. Poets like Pindar stood to make a pretty little commission writing epinikia, or victory odes, for the successful athletes. Local poleis and demes often hired sculptors to produce a statue of the victor in the kairos, or moment of victory: perhaps you’d recognize the Diadumenos, or the Discobolus, or the Charioteer of Delphi.
The games were always commercial. True, there wasn’t so much branding back then (it’s hard to brand when you don’t have uniforms), but certainly commercial. Then, and now.
And yet these liberal PhD types act surprised, aggrieved, annoyed, indignant, personally offended that, hey, it’s Olympic time. God forbid that once every four years academics should have to suffer through the mere knowledge of the spectacle of athletes from around the world competing in sports that don’t interest them. How rude. Really, I don’t know how we stand it. We must be pretty tough sorts.
But here’s the thing about the Olympics: They are freaking cool.
For starters, they speak to the classical ideal of physical and mental education as prerequisites in the formation of an ideal citizen. Plato competed in at least three of the stephanetic games (Isthmia, Delphi, and Nemea) and may have also competed in Olympia.
The very concept that warring nations (or poleis) might set aside their arms for a period and compete in athletic events, that there may be some space, some sacred space, in which something can subjugate political enmity, is fucking radical.
It was radical then and, in case you haven’t checked lately, it’s radical now.
Scandals? Yes. Of course there are going to be scandals. Competition of any sort encourages dishonesty. In antiquity, the judges dressed in black and carried switches with which they could lash any athletes caught cheating. Those who got caught had to pay hefty fines, and indeed at Olympia one can still see the statues bases for the Zanes: bronze statues of Zeus cast from the bronze coins paid in fines. They were life-size, and there were about 16 or 17 of them lining the way to the stadium. The message was pretty clear: Don’t cheat!
The athletes received their lane assignment by lots, because fairness was of such a concern. The hysplex, which is a starting mechanism for the ancient stadium, was created precisely to avoid false starts. It has been reconstructed at Nemea, which is where I excavated.
As such, the games were highly democratic in nature, save for the chariot races, which were aristocratic. Then, as now, some events were for the 1%. But it has been argued, convincingly I think, that the games may have contributed to the inception and rise of democracy.
The modern Olympics, as many know, were founded by the slightly mad genius Baron Pierre de Coubertin, high on the dangerous elixir of romanticism. de Coubertin was not a jock himself. He was, well, an academic, studying and writing on the topics of education, history, literature, and sociology.
Ahem.
And yes, de Coubertin had one hell of a hard on for ancient Greece and all things ancient and Grecian. But he also developed an educational philosophy based precisely on the Athenian model in which intellectual and physical training were seen as two parts of one whole, and the means through which intellect and character would grow most robust.
And as we’ve seen increasingly over the past decade or so, Physical Education and sports programs have been cut from schools, recesses have been decreased as teachers “teach to the test,” and we turn into a nation of lard asses with ADHD.
de Coubertin was right!
Ok, first the Athenians and Spartans and Eleans and Corinthians and all the others were right. But then de Coubertin. The mind learns better if the body is also active. For some, particularly boys, a lack of physical activity appears to be linked to attention and learning disorders, as well as stress and depression.
So physical activity, including physical competitions (we engage in mental competitions, do we not?), is good for your mind. Any division between jock and intellectual is a modern invention, and one that should worry us.
So, what’s the role of the Olympics in all of this? The Olympics do not serve merely what Reinhardt referred to as the “Greco-Roman square dancer,” for whom a bronze may mean a hell of a lot, regardless of what any of us think of the sport. It al
so serves the spectators, who ideally should come to see physical excellence and competition in a new light, and as something integral to what it means to be a citizen of the US, of Iran, of France, of Brazil, of KSA, of China. This was de Coubertain’s goal.
Not every kid can win a race but every kid can run.
As our kids have less and less recess and fewer and fewer organized sports in schools, we have crippled the core interaction between mental and physical training, leaving it up to soccer moms. And as American children see fewer and fewer examples of physical aptitude in their daily lives, especially of girls, I think it’s really freaking cool for them to be able to see the Olympics.
Not every kid is going to love soccer, or run fast, or jump high. But maybe they’ll see something there that is just their thing, and that’s great. And hopefully all of them will realize that someone else’s thing can be good too.
My son is a case in point. He’s athletic but has a fairly low opinion of female athleticism. Not because he’s a sexist but just because he doesn’t see many girls his age engaged in anything athletic. But then he saw twenty seconds of a women’s gymnastic routine a few days back. He was blown away. His jaw dropped open three seconds into the floor routine. We then spent about twenty minutes googling Nadia Comaneči and Olga Korbut videos as I taught him about the origins and evolution of women’s gymnastics.
And I watched his entire opinion of women’s athleticism dissolve and reconfigure itself. “Girls” were no longer just the ones who play jump rope during recess and talk about fairies. Some girls could kick his ass. And he liked that.
So. From one liberal academic to another: shut up. The Olympics are cool. If 
you don’t try to make them into something they’ve never been, stop bitching about how commercialized and awful the coverage is (like you didn’t know), and instead spend a bit of time thinking about all of the things they are.
And they are pretty cool.