End the Olympic Farce

Sochi introduced a new Winter Olympic event this year--the feral three-legged dog race. There’s no prize for the winner, but all the losers are shot.

But seriously. The city of Sochi had a problem with wild dogs. They were everywhere. One of them wandered onto the Fisht Stadium field during rehearsal for the opening ceremonies. Authorities had a choice either to shoot them or poison them. They chose to poison them. Now there are dead dogs everywhere, which is much better. You can pet them and they won't bite.

Sochi is a strange place to hold the Winter Olympics. It's a subtropical climate where it rarely ever gets below 37 degrees. And even though it is the largest resort city in Russia, it must have been a dump. Even after all fixing it up, it was still a dump. When they arrived, athletes and journalists were appalled at the hotel conditions—brown toxic tap water (if there was water at all), missing door knobs, bizarre toilet arrangements (a cultural feature they should have changed), tiny beds, and various things falling apart or in mid-construction. The International Olympic Committee looks into these details very carefully. Was someone bribed or threatened? If so, it must have been quite a bribe. I mean, we know that goes on, but we usually end up with a plausible location. But a terrorist-rich, subtropical Stalin-era resort city with ridiculous toilet culture?

Sochi is the most expensive Olympics ever, whether Summer or Winter—$10 billion more than the previous record holding 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. At $51 billion, Sochi has been more expensive than all previous Winter Olympics combined. Much of the $51 billion cost for Sochi has been the cost of building most of it from scratch--plus corruption and Putin's Ring of Steel to defend against the terrorist threats in this predominantly Muslim Caucasus region.

And why do we even have the Olympics anymore? Does it bring us together in world peace? After over 116 years, there is still no evidence of that. Besides, there are international sports competitions for everything. The Olympics are politicized and involve ridiculous expenditures, often human rights abuses—bulldozing people’s homes and sweeping away the poor like they were so much litter—and even environmental destruction. A German publication reports that a highway and a railway were “cut through Sochi National Park - a nature reserve with world heritage status.”

But the Olympics will remain with us because, regardless of what happens to everyone else, a few powerful people make a lot of money by arranging and staging them.

If we must keep them, we should have the Winter Olympics permanently in Switzerland and the Summer Olympics in Athens where they began. The facilities are already there. There will be no political theater and minimal corruption. But even that would involve international co-operation and good will which does not seem to be in the spirit of the Olympics.

Patriotism and Sports Pride

It was a strange providence that the Lord timed my oath of citizenship to coincide with the Vancouver Winter Olympics and, at the end of that, the great hockey showdown between my new country and the old country. It stirred up some surprising sentiments.

What was also suprising was that my Yankee wife "supported" the Canadian team for the gold medal, even though she is fiercely patriotic. She caught some jesting grief for this from a friend or two. The next day, a student confronted me over where my heart lay in the contest with Canada, making it clear to me before I answered that this was the litmus test for the sincerity of my solemn affirmations at the naturalization ceremony. So the two of us gave some thought to the relationship between patriotism and internation sports competition.

Here is part of my WORLDmag.com essay that came of it:

I have suffered a few aspersions because, though I am now an American citizen, I nonetheless felt an affinity for the Canadian Olympic hockey team, and even thought it was right that they should win the gold medal. Someone went so far as to suggest that the direction of my allegiance in this contest was the test of my fidelity to the oath of citizenship I took. But patriotism, the healthy love of one’s country, has nothing to do with international sports.

...[I]f a patriot is one who loves his country and seeks what is best for her, then he may withhold his cheers for an unworthy national team, and even direct his cheers elsewhere if he thinks his country’s victory in that case would be bad for the national character. So why turn against the U.S. hockey team?

...An Olympic gold for the United States in hockey would have encouraged a belief in manifest destiny that does not bring out the best in this exceptional people to whom, on firmly held principle, I have chosen to join myself.

Read the whole provocative thing: "Patriotism is not Boosterism."