Commentary : A Call for Returning to the Olympic Ideal

My commentary is not a farewell to the modern Olympic era, whose idealism seems to have passed into oblivion, but rather a search for a way out of the elitism and commercialism of international sports.

Those two phenomena caused the demise of the ancient Olympic Games after more than 2,000 years. They seem to have devoured the modern Games in less than a century. And arbitrary, punitive measures will not remedy the ills of sports. Allow me to invoke the original modern Olympic message, which aspires to something better:

“The main issue in life is not the victory, but the effort; the essential is not to have won, but to have striven well. To spread these concepts is to pave the way for a more valiant humanity, stronger, and consequently more scrupulous and generous.”

This often-quoted first paragraph of Baron Pierre de Coubertin’s “Expression,” the poetic explanation of the objectives for the modern Olympic Games, does not advocate that one should be a good loser, as some have interpreted it. It says that the process of an individual’s growth through meticulous training and competing is more important than the fleeting glory of victory.

Long before Coubertin, the universities in England and the physical culture centers in Europe maintained that physical training was indispensable in discovering one’s potential for rich and graceful movement, promoting strength and stamina and molding an honest, fearless, self-disciplined and self-reliant character. Such ideas go back to Socrates.

And in China, sometime between 50 and 130 A.D., a writer, Yu, described the impartiality and discipline of a football game:

A round ball and a square wall,

The ball flying across like the moon

While the teams stand opposed.

Captains are appointed and take their places.

No allowances are made for relationship.

According to unchanging regulations,

There must be no partiality

But there must be determination and coolness

Without the slightest irritation at failure.

And if all this is necessary for football,

How much more for the game of life?

In 1894, Coubertin organized a small congress. It was attended by representatives of 12 European nations that were tired of constant feuding on the Continent. They discussed the potential of the Olympic movement to produce something healing and helpful.

The baron convinced his peers that the essence of sports would be understandable everywhere, and, therefore, that sports could guide people toward mutual appreciation. In the second stanza of his “Expression,” he said:

“The Olympic movement gives the world an ideal which reckons with the reality of life and includes the possibility to guide this reality toward the great Olympic Ideal: Enjoyment of muscular effort, cultivation of beauty, dedication to service to family and society; tying these elements into one, insoluble, aggregation.”

Nations’ Olympic participation has grown more than a dozen times larger than the original gathering in Paris. As a spectacle, the Games have become a mega-event. But educationally, Olympic growth has been stunted by compromises in the last 20 years.

Most unfortunately, the ardent friendships that used to spring from mutual admiration and appreciation among the fiery contestants have been nearly suffocated.

Where tensions used to cease with the final try, the last heave or the last whistle, and the camaraderie began, now secretiveness and mistrust continue.

Whereas athletes used to coach one another, the new stars and their coaches yield neither innovative training ideas nor time-tested knowledge to a potentially outstanding newcomer. The spirit of the Olympic Village, where the tribes of humanity are not separated by fences or mine fields, continues to flicker in the underdog. But the isolated, self-protective superstar lives in the downtown hotel. Chauvinism does not separate athletes. Money does.

The flames of business were not lighted by the Olympic torch. They began with the contracts of national sports leaders who wanted to see their national champions excel internationally. Years ago--and now in the greater part of the Third World--the choices were obvious: Either accept the guaranteed hold on the Olympic medals by the better fed and rested nations, or afford one’s home talent extra sponsorship.

But private invitational meets quickly moved in with selectively offered, clandestine and sizable payments. Sporting goods companies followed. The competitors quickly discovered that practicing their events as a vocation propelled them past those for whom athletics remained an avocation.

The commercialization of athletics first was allowed to prevail in big popular meets in Europe, then in the United States and elsewhere, and then to roll into the Olympic Games. Today, for example, nearly all national teams compete in nationally symbolic warm-up suits and shoes given to them by sporting goods companies. Naturally, the athletes’ clothes are paid for by the exorbitant markups on those companies’ products sold to the public.

At the Seoul Olympics, Greg Louganis appeared to be the closest to the way the Olympic champion used to be, one who approached his event as an expression of his own artistic fire.

In the Winter Games, an English ski jumper, Eddie Edwards, a dinosaur amateur nicknamed the Eagle, reflected strangely against the polish of the career skiers who had stopped at Calgary on their way to the next ski event. He had come to the Games without a hope of winning but was thrilled at the prospect of competing.

The mass-appeal Summer Olympics have some people believing that it is possible to beat the career athletes and near-millionaires. Parents drill their tots in running because they think the big money lies there.

But money and sponsorships have helped the professional athletes reach levels they could not possibly have reached as amateurs. Money buys time to train, time to rest, excellent training facilities, freedom from family economic pressures, diversion and publicity.

Carl Lewis, for instance, was not defeated by someone who was earning his living by working 9 to 5. Ben Johnson is a highly paid sprinter from Jamaica who lives comfortably in Canada. The sensational match was expected. The arrangements had already been made for a return race in Tokyo, for which each man was to be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But Johnson was accused of taking steroids, which, if true, indicates that the record times in the sprints also have approached the upper limits of natural human speed.

In spite of the criticism leveled against him, however, Johnson did not violate anything sacred. He may have done something that others have engaged in for several years and for which at least a dozen others were suspended at Seoul.

Too many records have been pushed to heights that lie beyond the reach of normally functioning men or women. The young talent who hopes to challenge such records is forced to fall into chemical step.

And so, participating in sports is no longer a simple search for human physical development. The message to young athletes is that money confirms excellence--and that excellence not confirmed by money is somehow in doubt. Moreover, inflated records and performances of the commercially or pharmaceutically aided athletes are honored as if achieved only by the old-fashioned means of sacrifice and grit.

To a beginning athlete, that is discouraging. He or she may work for many months and show only modest progress. To get up there, the athlete surmises, requires either a superman or an eternity. That is a lonely thought.

Substantial changes can be achieved only if athletics is put back in education as a tool for individual and national healthful development. Imperfect and controversial as it may be, there should be natural and open categories in major athletic contests, including the Olympic Games. And a new chapter in record books should be started. We need to relearn what are excellent performances by natural athletes.

Drug testing, even the year-round, surprise testing, is only a cosmetic measure. It is the war cry of the adult leaders who have failed to educate, but would not hear about a change.

Year-round testing really makes no sense. For it to be practical, it must be assumed that only a small group of high achievers will dominate and thus need to be tested. But to test one person and not all is discriminatory. And to test one early in the training season and another one later on, for example, invites misuse.

To test fairly means that all the countries in the Olympic movement not only will choose to cooperate but will be able to afford to cooperate.

And the year-round testing idea assumes that athletes all over the world will gleefully cast away their rights to privacy and advise the officials of their whereabouts in order to be available for surprise testing. And that every time an athlete sees a doctor, he or she will bring along a list of banned substances so that one of them is not accidentally prescribed.

Will a more valiant and stronger humanity be achieved by drug testing? What if someone quietly says, “I violate no rules. You are robbing me of my pride by your mistrust. I must be trusted if I am to learn to trust.”? Will that be a champion speaking or one who will be kept out of the competition?

Besides, testing deals with the symptoms rather than the problems. As long as the quest for victory is the primary goal, athletes will continue to augment natural strength, speed and endurance.

So where do we go from here? What do we expect from athletics for our younger brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, cousins, friends? What kind of human beings do we want to represent our towns, high schools, universities, service clubs, ourselves? What kind of human being should represent humanity in the Olympic Games?

Long ago, the basketball coach, John Wooden, composed a pyramid of success. It is a geometrically shaped verbal composition of physical and character qualities he believes have produced outstanding performers.

One big pyramid composed of thousands of Wooden’s pyramids may restore athletics to its proper educational role in the United States. Educators, parents, insurance companies must find enough love and patriotism in their hearts to determine what is a needed, invigorating challenge and what is a risky or punitive adventure. But a progressively more demanding, yet patient and feeling, physical education at all levels must be the pyramid’s base.

There also should be no demand on schools to provide extra training for early discovered talent or to push certain youngsters toward athletic scholarships or professional careers. A more efficient way to go would be the development of community clubs and a competitive club system.

The pride of belonging to a sports club in one’s town or city district--just belonging--or representing the club in a league would restore the communal sense in our young people. A well-run community club would help prepare the youth for partnership with the adult world.

Right now, the opportunity to reach the pinnacle of success is not equitable. And it is shrinking every day. Increasingly, the professional leagues and the colleges recruit talent from other corners in the world, further minimizing the possibility for a U.S. girl or boy to excel. Surely, many of them are invited to play abroad by clubs, which perpetrate similar injustice against their own youth.

Although a dash of such exchange would be healthy, negativism is created when the practice becomes a runaway situation. For our nation, which has so many disenchanted people, the extension of rare opportunity abroad is clearly bad.

The selection of the U.S. teams for the Olympic Games is also a mess.

In some events, the United States Olympic Committee maintains the traditional one-time grueling tryout.

In others, the teams are held together, and paid, for years. Here the institutionalized coaches hold occasional tryouts whenever they please.

The newcomer must be a super performer in the events in which the selection is made, based on objective measurements, and a super performer with connections in the events in which the outcome depends on a more subjective judgment. Even the National Sports Festival, which at first was hailed as the opportunity for juniors to demonstrate their talents, gradually reverted to publicizing the adult commercial athletes.

So what chance is there for a young man or woman who graduated from high school and went to work? Or a college dropout?

And how many fabulously talented athletes in the streets have killed themselves with narcotics? Are we caught in the paradox in which some burn their energy by running the streets and taking drugs, while others take drugs hoping to get in the running for a chance to leave the streets?

Pierre de Coubertin’s “Expression” concludes: “May joy and fellowship reign and in this manner, may the Olympic torch pursue its way through the ages.”

It may, if humanity’s determination will carry it.