If there is a cheat sheet on how to host a controversy-free Olympics — or at least one that keeps the local population on board — it has not reached any of the cities that have won the Summer Games post-Barcelona. Boston recently cut short its plan for a bid for the 2024 Olympics, even though the city was seen to have a good chance of winning. A U.S. Olympics Committee official said, “We have not been able to get a majority of the citizens of Boston to support hosting the 2024 Olympic [Games].” Earlier Hamburg, another strong contender, withdrew from the contest when its residents voted in a referendum to not host the 2024 event. In fact, Munich, venue of the especially newsy 1972 Summer Olympics, had earlier voted against a bid for the 2022 Winter Games. When the Germans take fright at hosting mega-tournaments, you know that there’s a crisis sports enthusiasts can ignore no longer.
What not to doFor those keen to get their city folk on their side, however, David Goldblatt’s new book, The Games: A Global History of the Olympics (Macmillan), serves as a handy compendium of all that the organisers should not do. Goldblatt’s is a feat of distillation and storytelling, as he runs through the past 120 years in less than 400 pages, retaining all that is noteworthy. As readers familiar with his earlier work, especially Futebol Nation: A Footballing History of Brazil , would expect, the text is edgy, with the tension created by the parallel narratives of the awe-inspiring achievements of sportspersons and the machinations of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), domestic organising committees, host nations and cheat machines (particularly the doping network).
And that basically is the challenge — to appreciate the need to ensure the grand stage for the four-yearly competition of the world’s best by reforming the organisation process. In effect, it boils down to finding a way to limiting the IOC’s extravagant demands, as it forces cities into a spiral of promises in the bidding frenzy, goes on to issue diktats on preparations, and imposes rules on how venues and even city traffic are run during the Games — with no care for the sensitivities or the lived lives of the hosts.
It may not be fair to blame on Brazil the current wariness of democracies of hosting the Games, but the protests that gripped the country in 2013 (against the backdrop of the Confederations Cup) cast a shadow that lengthened to fall on the 2014 World Cup (with wasteful infrastructure requirements imposed by FIFA) and this month’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, and it has certainly given the rest of the world pause. It may be a confluence of too many unforeseen developments: the global economic slowdown, commodities crash, President Dilma Rousseff’s political setbacks, the Zika outbreak even. But if any city has needed the countdown to end in a hurry and the Games to begin, it is Rio.
The promise of RioIt started on Friday with a colourful, engrossing opening ceremony, and perhaps for no city has the quality and integrity of the competition been as important as a redeeming finale. For the obvious reason that it was written in advance of the Rio Olympics, the chapter on the 2016 tournament in The Games does not have human stories of athletes’ accomplishment that other chapters do. But the promise is well presented in a companion volume Goldblatt has co-authored with Johnny Acton and Paul Simpson, How to Watch the Olympics: An Instant Initiation into Every Olympic Sport at Rio 2016.
It is a book crammed with trivia as well as the overarching themes. One problem with the Olympics in the 21st century comes through clearly. For at Rio, golf is included as a medal sport. Golf! Don’t even try to figure that out and listen instead as Goldblatt and Co helpfully tell you in the wrestling chapter: “More than most sports, wrestling needs a spectacular Olympics at Rio.” Recall that in 2013 the IOC executive board had actually axed wrestling as an Olympic sport 2020 onwards based on criteria such as television ratings, ticket sales, anti-doping issues and universal popularity — only to be persuaded to reverse the decision later. Such criteria ignored wrestling’s connect to the ancient Olympics, the great geographic arc of its popularity, from the U.S. to Russia, to Iran and India and onwards, as well as the smell of the earth that its stars uniquely bring to the Summer Games. Amazingly, long before the Iran nuclear deal, the U.S.’s and Iran’s best participated in an event in New York City’s Grand Central to make a point about the appeal of wrestling. To make its case, wrestling also sorted out its gender imbalances so that women will now compete for as many freestyle medals as men do, six each.
Perhaps the Olympic movement — all its stakeholders, and not the IOC oligarchy alone — needs to take stock of what sports define the spirit of the Summer Games, and how to involve local communities in decision-making on how they are conducted.
mini.kapoor@thehindu.co.in
