BIG READ: The thrilling, gut-wrenching show will go on at the Olympics

This year’s edition of the Olympic Games, starting in Tokyo on  July 23, will be strangely silent and surreal. Spectators will be entirely absent, as Japan has declared a state of pandemic emergency spanning the event’s duration.

With so much risk and with much local opposition, why haven’t the Games been cancelled? Money, of course. Tokyo’s new national stadium cost $15.4bn and it must be put to use, even if the images of an empty sporting cathedral will underwhelm the worldwide TV audience. And the global broadcasting rights of $5.4bn make up 73% of the revenues of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Eighty percent would have had to be refunded if the Games were cancelled, so that was never going to happen.

Money wasn’t the agenda of the founder of the modern Olympics, French aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin. The backdrop for his idea was the Great Game, as the 19th-century colonial manoeuvres between the British and Russian empires were called, and escalating conflict in the Balkans. In the early 1890s De Coubertin had decided to create a cultural exchange and sporting competition, believing that “wars break out because nations misunderstand each other”. He wanted to forge peace.

The first modern Games were held in Athens in 1896. But De Coubertin was soon to be disappointed, as World War 1 broke out less than 20 years later.

Politics have always been front and centre of the Olympics. National resurgence and propaganda was Hitler’s agenda for the 1936 Berlin Games, later known as the Nazi Olympics. The US, grasping his intent, almost boycotted.

The Nazis largely succeeded, winning the most medals overall, including golds. But the US and black athletes had a measure of schadenfreude as Jesse Owens won four golds — the blue-riband 100m, 200m, long-jump and 4x100m relay — in one of the all-time great Olympic achievements, which infuriated Hitler.

But Owens was dismayed not by his reception in Berlin but by that of his own government. “Hitler didn’t snub me, it was [Franklin Roosevelt] who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram,” he revealed. Indeed, only the white Olympians were invited to the White House, and it was only in 2016 that then president Barack Obama received the relatives of the 1936 black participants and formally celebrated their accomplishments. 

Post-war austerity

The first post-World War 2 Olympics in 1948 came to be known as the Austerity Games. Food was still rationed in parts of Europe, including England and the Netherlands. That didn’t deter London from hosting, nor did it dull the flame of 30-year old Dutchwoman, Fanny Blankers-Koen.

Despite a stellar athletics career before the war, she was written off as too old, and Dutch sentiment was that she should stay home to look after her children. But she won four golds, in the 100m, 200m, 80m hurdles and 4x100m relay. The “Flying Dutchwoman” became an international icon: the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) declared her the female athlete of the century in 1999 and — having run 11 races in eight days — her victories are recognised as helping to repudiate the stereotype that age and motherhood are barriers to sporting success.

The 1968 Olympics in Mexico City were shadowed by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jnr and US senator Robert Kennedy just months earlier. Worldwide, waves of social protest were happening, including civil rights and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in the US. Europe saw the democratic Prague Spring revolution brutally suppressed, ending after six months with the invasion of 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 2,000 tanks on August 20 1968.

A week later, in Mexico City itself, a rolling series of major demonstrations started, 500,000-strong, rallying for democratic reforms. “We don’t want Olympics, we want revolution!” was one of the slogans. Ten days before the Olympics were due to start, the government ordered a military crackdown and an estimated 400 unarmed demonstrators were killed in what became known as the Tlatelolco massacre.

Unsung heroes and heroines

Czechoslovakian gymnast Věra Čáslavská had won three golds in 1964. In Mexico City, in two events, the scoring gave her victory, but in both instances the judges suspiciously overturned their decisions, declaring her a joint winner for the floor exercises and downgrading her to silver in the beam. Both beneficiaries were Soviet gymnasts. On the podium, during the Soviet anthem, Čáslavská turned her head away in protest. She had been a vocal supporter of the Prague Spring movement. Back home, again under draconian communist rule, she paid a heavy price, banned from gymnastics and socially shunned for decades.

An iconic act of civil rights symbolism also occurred at Mexico City when 200m winner Tommie Smith and third-place finisher John Carlos bowed their heads and gave a clenched-fist, black-gloved salute as the American anthem played during the medal ceremony. They stood on the podium shoeless in black socks, symbolising the poverty of many Black Americans. “It was a cry for freedom and for human rights,” said Smith, decades later.  They returned home victorious but — in the eyes of the media and the establishment — in disgrace.

Horror hit the Games themselves when the Black September Palestinian terrorist group stormed the Munich Olympic Village in 1972, taking hostage and then murdering 11 Israeli athletes. For 48 hours the world’s 900-million TV audience watched the unfolding horror, not sport. It took 44 years before the IOC consented to commemorating the victims as part of the opening ceremony at the Rio 2016 Games.

Born to run

Running — the heart and soul of any Olympics — is perhaps mankind’s purest physical pursuit, a metaphor for life’s straining and striving. Jamaica has dominated sprinting in the past three Olympics, with Usain Bolt smashing world records in a procession of victories in the 100m and 200m, and Shelly-Ann Fraser and Elaine Thompson commanding the blue-riband women’s races.

But if there were to be a selection of runners to represent the pinnacle of humanity’s running elite — speed and endurance, tactics and grace — it would be the Kenyan long-distance athletes.

The 1968 games were again seminal in marking the start of their dominance, rivalled subsequently by other East African nations to create a pantheon of legends such as Kip Keino, Vivian Cheruiyot and Haile Gebrselassie. And, more recently, Eliud Kipchoge, who has reshaped the concept of possibilities in marathon running. His 2016 win was by the largest margin in nearly 50 years and in October 2019 he broke the two-hour barrier — albeit in a staged event, thus not recognised as a world record. Watch out, world, for August 8.

Gymnastics are a drawcard event in the Olympics, and every four years we reacquaint ourselves with the vault, the parallel, uneven and horizontal bars, balance beams and the pommel horse.

For occasional gymnast fans, a perfect score of 10 was thought to be impossible. Actually, it had been done many times, by male and female gymnasts, most notably by Čáslavská at the 1967 European Championships.

But never before in an Olympics — until 1976 in Montreal when 14-year-old Romanian Nadia Comăneci achieved perfection on the uneven bars. Photographs show her beaming alongside the electronic scoreboard indicating 1.00. The system hardware hadn’t been configured for the possibility of a 10.0.

Glorious, gallant failure  

But the Olympics aren’t only about grace, power, speed and skill. There’s passion, and sometimes craziness. Eric Moussambani, a swimmer from Equatorial Guinea, was allowed entry at Sydney 2000 in terms of the IOC’s wild card system to encourage participation from developing nations. He had never seen an Olympic-sized pool before stepping onto the starting block for his 100m heat. Under the amused — and pitying — gaze of 17,000 spectators and the global TV audience he barely managed to stay afloat for the last 20m, finishing in an Olympic record slowest time of 1:52.72. “Eric the Eel” the media dubbed him.  

The temptation is to smile at this commitment and desire to participate, but it raises the question of fairness: should serious contenders from other nations be denied the opportunity to win based on per-country quotas? One IOC luminary, Jacques Rogge, subsequently the body’s president between 2001 and 2013, and still its honorary president, wasn’t impressed: “We  want to avoid what happened in the swimming in Sydney. The public liked it, but I did not,” he said.

Tainted victories

The 1896 marathon runners were handed a beer at the start of the race, and in 1904 the winner had openly been given a booster dose of strychnine. But it’s unclear when athletes began using drugs seriously. Evidence highlights pioneering by erstwhile East German athletes in the 1970s, and subsequent systemisation and mastery by the Soviets and Russians.

I am one of the reasons my country won so many Olympic medals from 2004 to 2014, yet I was also the cause of their banishment from the Olympic Movement

—  Dr Grigory Rodchenkov

“I am one of the reasons my country won so many Olympic medals from 2004 to 2014, yet I was also the cause of their banishment from the Olympic Movement,” writes Dr Grigory Rodchenkov in The Rodchenkov Affair,  a sickening confession of sporting corruption supervised by the country’s secret police, the FSB, and sanctioned by judo-loving President Vladimir Putin. The country is officially banned, but more than 300 Russian athletes will compete at Tokyo under the Russian Olympic Committee flag.

But perhaps the most infamous single incident of drugs-related cheating was Canadian Ben Johnson’s 100m victory in Seoul in 1988, obliterating his own world record to 9.79sec. Three days later he was stripped of the title and the record, having tested positive for stanozolol. “From Hero to Zero” read a banner fellow Canadian athlete Mark Tewksbury hung from his window, summarising the swing from celebration to shame many Canadians felt.

SA’s re-entry

Shame of a different kind lay behind the sporting boycott of SA during apartheid, with the country barred from Olympic participation between 1964 and 1988. In terms of results, our re-entry into international sport was initially dismal: 93 competitors went to Barcelona in 1992 with heads held high, and high hopes, but returned with just two silver medals.

We were able to celebrate some heroes four years later in Atlanta. Penny Heyns won both the 100m and 200m breaststroke, and Josia Thugwane — who had narrowly escaped death five months earlier in a carjacking — sensationally triumphed in the marathon, by the narrowest-ever margin of victory, just three seconds.

What of SA’s hopes now? Two-time 800m champion Caster Semenya is absent, having refused to take medication to suppress her testosterone levels in compliance with World Athletics rules for selected distances, and then failing to run a qualifying time for the 5,000m. Reigning 400m Olympic champion and world record holder Wayde van Niekerk is back after a bad knee injury in 2017, but his return to form has been stop-start. Could 2018 Commonwealth Games winner and 2019 World Championship silver medallist Tatjana Schoenmaker replicate Penny Heyns’s achievements in the breaststroke events? Can Chad le Clos repeat his butterfly heroics of London 2012?

For something different — as one of five new sports include this year — tune into the surfing, where Bianca Buitendag is SA’s sole competitor. The World Surfing Tour was cancelled last year due to the pandemic, but she ranked 26th in 2019, and as high as fourth in 2015, so there’s always a chance.

If the Games mirror global geopolitical stability, they also signal the state of humanity’s progress. Falling records mark technological gains — not always positive, in the case of synthetic substances and pharmacological cheating. Wider national participation demonstrated a postcolonial embrace of the Third World. More sporting codes — and, from 1960, the incorporation of the Paralympics as an extension of the Summer Games — reflects the reality that societies are becoming more inclusive.

In gathering together cultures and nations, the Olympics showcase the range of physical activities at which nations excel: Bulgarian weightlifters, Russian wrestlers, Chinese table tennis players, Hungarian fencers, East African long-distance runners. The Olympics are a celebration of humanity’s diversity.

Dreams and inspirations

Diversity also means participation by rich and poor. Events such as show jumping and sailing seem more like leisure pursuits of the wealthy. But it’s heart-warming to discover the backstories of triumph from disadvantaged circumstances, like that of Sizwe Ndlovu, one of SA’s victorious lightweight coxless-fours rowers at London in 2012. “I remember, no white person wanted to row with a black person in the boat,” he recounted of his initial foray into the sport, after being inspired to get to the Olympics by watching Thugwane’s marathon gold in Atlanta. “When you watch on TV you see the light ... the atmosphere, how exciting it is, I said to myself, ‘I want to go to Olympics’.”

This is the essence of the Games. It makes us dream. It fascinates us on levels we can’t fully grasp. It distracts us from harsh realities — apart from post-war periods, we’ve never needed that more than in these Covid times.

Despite two horrific global wars, and so much continuing strife, it would be a disservice to dismiss De Coubertin’s 1890s vision as a failure. Hundreds of books, thousands of articles, millions of images and billions of momentary but deeply felt human emotions are tribute to the cultural impact of the Games. Their contribution to inspiring human endeavour across the past century should not be undervalued. Let’s enjoy Tokyo, whatever its flaws.