What ails the Olympic spirit?

“Prey to boasting and prone to shout
He had nothing to be modest about...”
From Always Blaming
by Bachchooswamy

There’s no getting away from the Olympics — not if you live in London, watch TV, listen to the radio or try and get a drink in a pub. The buzz is thunderous. Do I care? About being faster, jumping higher, throwing further, and slithering through water like the best shark? I don’t really.
I have cultivated virtual ear-plugging and telly-blindness.
Still, a whiff of controversy is vaguely beguiling. There was the affair of poor 16-year-old Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen who won the 200 metres gold and the 400 metres individual medley gold in startling times. She broke the Olympic record for the 400m and bettered her own time from only a few days before by five seconds or so. In a sport in which every micro-second is counted as a proof of better technique or physique, these five seconds are an unbelievable quantum leap.
A prominent American coach accused Ye of cheating. The Olympic anti-drugging agency immediately said it had diligently tested her for drug-taking and had certified Ye as 100 per cent clean with no doubts or ambiguities. The official American statement distanced itself from the remarks of the carping coach.
He, however, appeared on TV and perpetrated the idea that the cheating need not be through the ingestion of drugs but can now be executed through the transplantation of performance- enhancing genes.
This contention brought forth several genetic engineering experts. Their general view was that there were human genes associated with athletic performance, but none of them were sufficient to ensure such performance or even necessary to it. They were asked if genes could be as it were stitched on to someone like Ye Shiwen to make her swim faster. There were no clear answers. Ye retains her gold medal.
The second controversy broke over women’s badminton which I happened to watch on TV. One Chinese doubles team confronted a South Korean pair. From the off, the game looked ridiculous. These world champions were serving into the net and losing points. One South Korean girl in the fourth or fifth volley of the game hit the shuttlecock upwards and over her shoulder out of the court — not over the net, on her own side! The crowd began to boo. The referee walked to the net and warned the four players and when the game continued as before with each side trying to lose, he stopped the match and reported the players.
The official Olympic body instantly disqualified two South Korean pairs, one Chinese and one Indonesian doubles pair for betraying the Olympic spirit by not giving their best and attempting to throw their games to gain tactical advantage.
The Chinese Olympic authority stepped in and ordered their team to publicly apologise for their behaviour. One of their star players 26-six-year old Yu Yang didn’t apologise but announced her permanent resignation from her “beloved badminton”.
One current of opinion holds the rules of the game responsible for the tactical attempt to allow weaker teams to win in the heats and so maximise the chances of facing a weak team in the final. It wasn’t exactly cheating. Not quite in the same category as being accused of throwing a boxing match or bowling or batting badly in a cricket test because you’ve been paid off handsomely to so do by some illegal betting syndicate. Nevertheless, I suppose the athletes have all sworn an oath or something like it to give of their best and enter into the Olympic spirit and it’s quite clear that throwing badminton matches is not consistent with such an oath.
Which begs the question — what is the Olympic spirit? Take the British participants or “Team GB” as it has styled itself. They are crowing very loudly having variously won gold, silver and bronze in the bicycling, women’s canoeing, yachting, swimming and show-jumping events. They also won a bronze in the men’s gymnastics.
As the days and games progress keeping a score will be left to some specialist website and to people who are derided in Britain as “train-spotters” or “anoraks” — the gatherers of useless statistics who are held to be sad because they stand beside railway tracks wearing weather-proof canvas jackets taking down the numbers of trains that pass.
I shall not be keeping track of Team GB’s triumphs.
I notice though that Team GB is increasingly, if not exclusively, winning at games which require a large amount of capital investment. Show-jumping horses don’t come cheap. Neither do very finely designed yachts or for that matter canoes made of the lightest material. Even Chris Hoy’s bicycle (he of the repeated gold winners from Team GB) is scientifically and technologically designed and not quite the turned-up-moustache-handled heavy contraption I used to ride to
college every day in Pune.
It would be true to say that without sponsorship a contingent such as Team Somalia or Team Vanuatu would not be able to compete in these maritime sports even though the Somalis are quite fast at getting away from gunboats on their pirating expeditions and the Vanuatuans live surrounded by sea and have canoed and boated for millennia.
With a vast and centrally directed population such as China’s or with the sports endowments of the premier capitalist US, one can expect the swimmers, runners, hurdlers, boxers etc. to be in top form with the best training, coaching, diet and the ability to dedicate their lives to their sport without being distracted by having to follow religious fasts, not wearing clothes that reveal your legs or face, worrying about how you are going to pay for your daughters’ dowry or any other tradition or misfortune that bedevils the lives
of us non-sporting mortals.
So investment as in fleet yachts or as in a whole centralised society devoting resources to isolating talent from everyday cares, feeding, training and nurturing it ought really to be the credo of the modern Olympic movement.