A myth of Olympic proportions

EDITOR’S NOTE: Ilya Shapiro is currently on the ground in Vancouver and will be sending dispatches throughout the Olympic Games, posted here at The Daily Caller.

VANCOUVER—The 2010 Olympics, held in the largest city ever to host a Winter Games, have not gone completely according to plan.

Before the games even began, organizers lamented how Washington, D.C., was getting a surfeit of snow that would have helped certain venues. Then, a luger lost his life to a track that was apparently both the fastest in the world and the one with the least padding. Then the fourth arm that was to hold the Olympic cauldron failed during the opening ceremonies. Finally, as I personally observed, ice conditions detracted from several promising speed skating events.

Apart from these real concerns, however, political activists and their media enablers remind us of how drugs, commercialism and the threat of terrorism have spoiled the world’s preeminent athletic event. Columnists lament the passing of a purer age, when doctors trained to run four-minute miles in their spare time, when competition was its own reward and a medal brought national glory rather than celebrity endorsement contracts. These Cassandras habitually predict the demise of the Olympics as modern society wreaks havoc on the sacrosanct traditions of the ancients.

But this prediction is based on bad information; politicians’ beliefs that the games should promote a kinder, gentler, unified world reflect romanticized history. Since the end of the Cold War, the Olympics have thrown off the corrosive chains of ideological battle to revert to the values of the original Games, among which were the dominance of the personal over the national, the economic over the political, and the athletic over larger concerns of the state.

The standard view of the Greek Olympics as a halcyon festival bringing amateur sportsmen together in the name of peace and brotherhood is a remnant of 19th-century Romanticism, which was institutionalized by aristocrats like modern games founder Pierre de Coubertin. Adolf Hitler, who staged the 1936 Berlin Games as a testament to the German people—and invented the torch relay in the first place—was taken in by a similar Olympic vision of nationalism via physical perfection.

The ancient reality could not have been further from these modern misconceptions, however, as Greek armies routinely violated the Olympic truce, and battle sometimes took place in the Olympic sanctuary itself. Individualism and athletic prowess were valued much more than mere participation, and wealth superceded ideology.

Pindar, the lyric poet whose victory odes tell us much of what we know about the early Olympians, wrote at the behest and patronage of wealthy athletes, who sought personal glory rather than the vindication of their city-state and its political system. And the great champion Alcibiades used his prestige to gain fame and riches, often at the expense of his “national interest.”

Further, the ancient heroes were Panhellenic—Athenian kids cheered for a Spartan Lindsay Vonn—and the victors’ olive wreaths were intrinsically worth about as much as the medals doled out in Vancouver.