OLYMPICS DISTRACT FROM IMPORTANT MATTERS OF STATE
By Ross Runfola     
Buffalo News August 31, 2008 

     The Olympics are often cited as an example of symbolic war in the form of athletic competition to develop brotherhood. In theory, the Olympics are above the rancor of international politics; in actuality they are not. Victories in the Olympics have been the functional equivalencies of war ever since they were used by Sparta to train warriors for war against other nation-states in Greece. This has been the unfortunate history of the Olympics ever since. Adolph Hitler attempted to use the 1936 Nazi Olympics as proof of the Germans as a master race. In 1948, the new state of Israel was denied the right to participate because of a threatened Arab boycott. The 1968 Games saw South Africa banned for racial apartheid. In 1980, the United States boycotted the Moscow Olympics, and in 1984, the Soviet Union reciprocated. Throughout the so called "Cold War”, the then Soviet Union and the USA, competed in a virtual reality to show who was winning the hearts and minds of the world.
       The Olympics and war are both born from the same jingoistic temperament. Even the construction of sports facilities for the Olympic competition, has throughout time wasted precious money that could be used for the construction of housing for the poor with government subsidized opulent structures that most often are obsolete after the games, never more than in the 1976 Olympics in Montreal where the poor were actually displaced for the construction of the Olympic village.
        . And commercialism is rampant. Despite the fraud that the Olympics are an event for amateurs to shine, in truth the athletes from most countries are highly paid professionals subsidized by companies like Nike often earning hundreds of thousands of dollars before the Games, and even more when like swimmer Michael Phelps of the United States, they become cultural icons
       The Olympics are also considered a wholesome vehicle for selling commercial products under the guise of patriotism. In fact, the Olympics are really "patriotism in a jock strap". And who can forget the Freudian symbolism when USA Olympic skating champion Peggy Fleming, skated into men's living rooms and asked them to "fill her up" with Texaco gasoline. I am sure many sexually repressed "Electric Lilliputian" men, went to purchase gasoline whether they owned a car or not after the Fleming commercial.
         So the irony is striking that the Summer Games were held in China, a Communist/Capitalist dichotomy of a country that continues to occupy Tibet, supports brutal dictatorships in Darfur and Burma, and where human rights are routinely repressed. Millions were spent for the games while billions starve for the sake of being accepted in the community of nations..
    Borrowing a page from the playbook of President Nixon during the Vietnam war when he tried to talk sports to war protestors at the Lincoln Memorial in 1973, President Bush, an inveterate "jock sniffer", attended these Games instead of tending to pressing international affairs, and awkwardly attempted to talk sports and human rights in China and the Georgia-Russia conflict with NBC host Bob Costas.
     Although the Olympics have little impact in terms of serious diplomacy between nations, Bush used them, as he has all sports during his failed presidency, as an attempt to distract the nation from a failed war in Iraq, an economy in recession, and his eroding of the American Constitution.
     
Dr. Ross T. Runfola is a professor of Social Sciences at Medaille Collage and an attorney.