OLYMPIC
LOG-ROLLING?
The
scene of the battle: the
ice-skating pairs competition, where Anton
Sikharulidze and Elena Berezhnaya edged out Canada's David
Pelletier and Jamie Sale by a vote of 5 to 4. Almost immediately,
the
New York Post alleges, "reports that Eastern European
nations bloc-voted for the Russians
began to swirl." The
air of intrigue soon culminated in a sensational allegation,
when NBC News reported that a French skating judge had been
"pressured" into voting for the Russians by the French skating
federation, in return for a future vote in the ice dancing
competition, to be held Friday. Has log-rolling
become the most important Olympic sport? In no time, battle
lines began to form
.
BATTLE
OF THE ACRONYMS
The
resulting furor rivals many of the serious foreign policy
crises of the past few years, at least in terms of noise level
and short-term intensity: the subsequent jockeying and bureaucratic
infighting involves more
politicking and organizational acronyms than the UN, NATO,
and the EU combined. The COA is up in arms over the ISO's
decision to postpone a Board meeting until Friday, but the
ISU is taking the initiative and making its case directly
to the IOC or whatever. In any case, what's of interest in all this is the barely concealed nationalistic hysteria
that overcomes people in this context.
AESTHETIC
COLD WAR
The
political-ideological subtext of this dispute is fascinating,
and Mark Starr makes it even more so in an incisive piece,
"Ire and Ice,"
over on MSNBC.com, wherein he explains the cultural and aesthetic
roots of the dispute:
"American
coaches, led by Frank Carroll, had presaged the controversy
earlier in the week by insisting that the judging was always
biased in favor of the Russians and against skaters from the
West. Carroll, the former coach of Michelle Kwan and current
coach of American Olympian Tim Goebel, was not suggesting
that there was still Cold War enmity at work. Rather, the
breakup of the Soviet Union created a lot more skating nations
– mostly former Soviet Republics like Belarus, Ukraine,
Latvia – with their own officials now in the judging
pool. And their aesthetic taste was governed by their training
in classic Soviet figure-skating styles."
POST-COLD
WAR OLYMPIC POLITICS
Yet
it isn't just a question of numbers, but of competing aesthetic
and cultural stances, with the elegantly balletic ex-Soviet
and East European teams, trained in the classical style, pitted
against the more acrobatic and mechanical Westerners. In the
bad old days of the cold war, everyone knew the Soviet judges
and their allies would always favor their own, and the same
for the Western allies. In the post-cold war world, however,
Olympic politics become much more Byzantine.
As
Starr points out, the old cold war pattern was broken by the
judges' decision in the ice-skating pairs competition. Five
of the judges were from the old anti-Soviet alliance – the
US, Canada, Germany, Japan, and France – and four from the
old Sino-Soviet bloc, including a Ukrainian and a Pole. The
defection of the French ensured an Eastern bloc victory
amid cries from "conspiracy theorists," as Starr puts it,
that the vote was rigged or bought. I particularly like his
take on the aesthetics of the judges' call: "Our silver medal
is worth a gold," quipped Jamie Sale, clearly indicating her
resentment over the decision. Starr writes:
"But
the Russians' gold won't require any emotional alchemy to
recognize. And there was plenty in their performance to suggest
they merited it. At the very least, it was more intricate,
stylized and sophisticated. In the end, perhaps the Canadians
paid a price for skating to the treacly 'Love Story.' And
in the eyes of one figure-skating fan who was there watching,
that wouldn't be the worst thing to happen to the sport."
CULTURES
IN COLLISION
It's
"Love Story"
versus Rachmaninoff, a cultural collision on ice that won't
be resolved by any Olympic committee. But it's very telling
that this division almost exactly replicates geopolitical
rivalries emerging on the world stage. France, always stubbornly
independent, whose leaders have described the US as a "hyperpower"
in horrified tones, is naturally at the center of this controversy.
Just as naturally, the Americans launched a preemptive strike
before the games had even begun, complaining of pro-Russian
bias.
ORWELL
WEIGHS IN
It
isn't just an aesthetic gap that separates the two sides,
but a cultural and political divide that operates in an Olympic
context. In "The
Sporting Spirit," a 1945 essay for Tribune,
the British left-wing weekly, George Orwell aptly described
the politicization of international sports as "typical of
our nationalistic age," and went on to ask:
"And
how could it be otherwise? I am always amazed when I hear
people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations,
and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet
one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination
to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn't know from concrete
examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international
sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce
it from general principles."
FROM
VILLAGE GREEN TO BATTLEFIELD
On
the village green, he averred, in a friendly game that didn't
involve a matter of prestige, except in the most personalistic
way, competitive sports could be enjoyed for their own sake,
for the sheer physical joy of motion. Yet just as soon as
matters of supra-personal prestige, either local or national,
are involved, "the most savage combative instincts are aroused,"
as Orwell puts it:
"At
the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare. But
the significant thing is not the behavior of the players but
the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators,
of the nations who work themselves into furies over these
absurd contests, and seriously believe at any rate for short
periods that running, jumping and kicking a ball are test
of national virtue."
WINNERS
& LOSERS, WALL STREET STYLE
Outside
of Canada, the
Wall Street
Journal was the
most embittered over this incident, accusing the Franco-Russian
Axis of outright "cheating" and describing the pairs skating
event as "a competition in which all experts say there was
a clear winner" the Canadians. Yet the author of the WSJ
piece, John
Feinstein, turns around and admits that judgements in
this case are necessarily "subjective." So much for the value
of those unnamed "experts"! Feinstein's solution is stereotypically
New Worldish: simply get rid of all those Olympic competitions
in which there isn't a clear winner and clear loser:
"If
you need judges to decide who wins, you can't be an Olympic
sport. Olympic sports should be those in which a person or
a team wins by going the fastest, jumping the highest or farthest,
or scoring the most points. No judges. Scoreboards don't lie
and they can't be bought off."
No
judges, no art, and forget about subjective values such as
visual beauty and purity of form: let's make it all as mechanical,
and cut-and-dried, as a profit-and-loss ledger. Whomever scores
the most points, wins. Such extreme reductionism is to be
expected of the Wall Street Journal, but I can do them
one better. I say why not get rid of the Olympic Games completely
and strike a small but meaningful blow for world peace?
ABOLISH
THE OLYMPICS
In
making the case for the abolition of the Olympics, I harken
back to Orwell a man who is no longer alive to defend himself
against the
idolatry of certain well-known warmongers, but who really
bore not the slightest resemblance to his frothy-mouthed latter
day epigones.
The author of 1984,
and the
conscience of his generation, saw "the sporting spirit"
in the international arena as "war minus the shooting," and
found the spectacle of the booing hissing crowds disgusting,
and politically disturbing:
"There
cannot be much doubt that the whole thing is bound up with
the rise of nationalism that is, with the lunatic modern
habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing
everything in terms of competitive prestige."
In
the present atmosphere of hysteria generated by 9/11 and the
war, this tendency is even more pronounced, as was evidenced
by the
preliminary brouhaha over the role of the WTC American flag
– and the disgraceful behavior of the audience (including
elements of the Western media) when the Canadians lost. Orwell
made the point that "there are quite enough real causes of
trouble already," without artificially manufacturing any more,
and certainly nothing has changed much since 1945 in that
respect except for the worse.
CANADIAN
NATIONALISM ISN'T THAT AN OXYMORON?
Orwell
was dead on right about this whole nasty business being bound
up with the rise of nationalism and groupthink. Why, this
ice-skating incident has even stoked the previously somnolent
fires of Canadian nationalism, with a commentator for
the CBC shrieking that this is "the Enron of umpiring, the
frozen Watergate of the Olympic Games" and demanding just
punishment of the judges – that "We
should turn them all over to Donald Rumsfeld."
DITCH
THE GAMES DON'T DOUSE THE FLAME
Yes,
isn't it just like our allies to casually assume the American
military is at their disposal? This we don't need, nor do
we need the Olympics. Let's ditch the Games, without dousing
the torch which can burn somewhere in seclusion until it
is ready to be carried into a more peaceful world.
OLYMPIC
WARS, II
There's
something mighty suspicious about the decision
of the International Olympic Committee to award the two Canadian
skaters gold medals and the story we're hearing about the
suspended judge, Marie-Reine Le Gougne, doesn't quite add
up. To begin with, the exact nature of the "pressure brought
to bear on the judge is maddeningly vague and accounts are
rife with discrepancies. For example, an
earlier version of the above-linked Reuters story tells
us:
"[ISU
president Ottavio] Cinquanta said le Gougne had 'practically
admitted" she had been put under pressure during a meeting
at which the American referee Ron Pfenning had been present.
Earlier this week, Cinquanta said Pfenning had handed him
a letter containing 'certain allegations.' He added if a judge
received pressure at any time the referee had to be informed.
'This did not happen in the case of Mrs. Le Gougne,' Cinquanta
said."
But
Pfenning is the referee, and, if he was present at
this alleged meeting, then he was informed. The loquacious
Mr. Cinquanta, a voluble Italian, talks a lot, but reveals
only his own confusion. There is, it seems, a lot more to
this controversy than meets the eye.
WHO
IS MARIE-REINE LE GOUGNE?
A
little research into the judge in question is revealing, to
say the least (thank the gods for Google.com!).
Here is an
interesting item from the January 20, 2001 issue of l'Humanite,
newspaper of the French Communist Party, a compilation
of critical quotes that target the sport of ice-skating as
"sexist" and "misogynist." Cited therein, Mademoiselle Le
Gougne characterizes her career as an official as:
"'Ten
years of hell! When I started to judge, with the beginning
I was used as substitute. During years, one called me the
one public holiday day before to go to judge where nobody
wanted to go. I accepted all the missions. Because, to succeed,
one must prove reliable twenty times more than one guy. I
know a multitude of girls who stopped because they did not
have the force to continue to fight. Me, one did everything
to eliminate me, and of course the attacks were very often
at the lower part of the belt. I received anonymous telephone
calls. Idem for the person with which I lived, moreover. One
enters your private life and one tries to massacre you on
all the plans. That was ten years of hell to impose to
me. On the bench of the judges, one hears remarks much rawer,
even cruel, on the skaters that on the skaters. Style: "large
cows" as soon as they have two kilos of too, whereas if it
is a boy which goes one well never does not treat it 'large
pig'."
NUTBALL
ALERT!
Anonymous
telephone calls? Really? Either this lady has a persecution
complex, or else the spirit of machismo is much more alive
and active in France than anyone ever suspected. What are
we to make of this "person" she lived with and why does
she bring it up? This weird stuff about how nameless persecutors
somehow interfered with her "private life" what's up with
that? Scrape away the veneer of feminist rhetoric,
and it looks like we have a real nutball on our hands. Is
this why earlier news stories depicted Le Gougne as "fragile"?
Unless, of course, it was a euphemism for batty.
AN
AXE TO GRIND
So
the American referee, Pfennig, heard Le Gougne complain that
those evil sexist Frenchmen had, in some mysterious manner,
pressured her to vote for the Russians. But Le Gougne clearly
has an axe to grind, and is less than reliable. Returning
to France, she will come out as the victim in all this: and
will no doubt use her newfound celebrity to elaborate on her
theme of feminine victimology.
WORST
POSSIBLE DECISION
In
the meantime, the Olympic Committee has made the worst possible
decision: caving in to Western pressure, while allowing the
Russians to retain their supposedly ill-gotten gold. But if
the Russians cheated, as is being alleged, then why are they
getting to keep their medals? No matter which side one takes,
this attempt to pull off the miracle of the loaves and the
fishes can only generate ill will on all sides. Justice, in
any case, has not been done. It's politics as usual.
EXIT
THE OLYMPICS
This
pathetic result only underscores and confirms my original
thesis the Olympics, far from promoting international brotherhood,
are simply an occasion for an orgy of nationalism. It's high
time to retire what has become an increasingly volatile, and
even dangerous, tradition. Don't mend it end it.
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