Games have chipped off the old bloc

It was summertime and Mark Dyreson, on vacation with his family in Montana, needed a place to watch the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
That meant a small-town bar where, stepping inside, he saw dead animals on the wall and guys in heavy boots. The customers were gathered around a television, watching intently. They were watching men’s diving.
“Probably not a sport they follow regularly there,” said Dyreson, a Penn State professor and sports historian.
“They’re all into it, yelling and cheering, hoping the Americans can beat the Chinese.”
Nationalism has been a big part of the Olympics’ popularity for the better part of a century. Americans, in particular, have treated the Games as a kind of patriotic crusade, say Dyreson and others who study the culture of sport.

But heading into the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, this traditional mind-set runs smack into a post-Cold War mentality that embraces cultural diversity, an Internet generation that thinks globally.

“The whole ‘us against them’ thing ... who, exactly, is ‘them’?” asked David Carter, executive director of the USC Sports Business Institute. “Is Al Qaeda putting together a team?”

With the opening ceremony set for Friday evening, experts wonder if nationalism still applies to the modern fan and what that means for the future of this venerable sporting event.

The International Olympic Committee has known for years that it needs to better connect with a young demographic. Ski cross has joined the program, added to a growing list of youth-oriented extreme sports such as snowboarding and aerial skiing.

Much is at stake for the Winter Games, which suffered a dismal showing in Turin four years ago, domestic viewership dropping 37%. Even with an expected bump in ratings this time, NBC expects to lose at least $250 million.

Orin Starn, a cultural anthropology professor at Duke University, believes that Vancouver -- like all other Olympics -- is influenced by its time and place in history.

“These are the blah Games, the anticlimax Games,” he said. “That reflects the climate in America and around the globe right now . . . the Obama luster seems to have worn off, there’s gridlock in Washington and a terrible catastrophe in Haiti.”

The one place where excitement and nationalism still run strong is on the U.S. team, even among the non-conformist snowboarders.

One of the most recognizable faces in Vancouver, halfpipe rider Shaun White, once appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine draped in an American flag. His teammate, Louie Vito, talked about what happens to a freewheeling, individualistic sport when it reaches the Games.

“To the rest of the world, it’s the U.S. against them,” he said. “It’s more about where you’re from than being an individual.”

Gretchen Bleiler, a defending silver medalist on the women’s team, concurred: “You get up to that halfpipe and you can’t help but feel patriotic.”

The idea of competing for love of country dates back to Baron Pierre de Coubertin, father of the modern Games, who viewed sport as a substitute for war and nationalism as a binding force in an increasingly atomized world.

For the United States, the notion took hold with the rise of the Soviet Union. The Olympic Games became a symbolic proving ground, a chance to validate the American way of life and American ideals.

“That’s the emotional wallop you get when an American wins the gold,” said Neal Pilson, a former president of CBS Sports who now works as an industry consultant. “That’s the Olympic cachet.”

But the fall of the Soviet bloc robbed the U.S. of an ideological foe on the playing fields.

Though the Chinese team finished a close second in the medal count in Beijing, it failed to inspire in Americans the heated emotions the Soviets once did.

David Wallechinsky, who has written extensively about Olympic history, explained that China had prepared for the Games by targeting offbeat events.

“Everyone else was busy cheering for Michael Phelps, then you looked up at the scoreboard and saw the Chinese had won four gold medals in women’s wrestling,” he said.

So where does that leave nationalism?

American flags will wave from the crowd in Vancouver and fans will chant “USA, USA!” The experts see this as evidence that jingoism endures in subtler, altered ways.

Perhaps it has become a hipper and more genuine version, as voiced by the athletes, Dyreson said. Another Olympic scholar, John MacAloon, wonders if fans might find a reason to cheer that better fits the new globalism.

“This is a time of great uncertainty about our place in the world,” the University of Chicago professor said. “It’s about repairing our damaged image as a nation-state.”

Regardless, it seems clear that nationalism is not the driving force it used to be.

The Olympic movement would be better off attracting fans another way, Wallechinsky said, through tales of individual success and failure, the drama that global competition always seems to produce.

“You just don’t have that rivalry anymore,” he said. “If we don’t win as many gold medals as Germany, who really cares?”

david.wharton

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