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| When I was a teenager I chanced to meet the man who came last in the final of the 1936 Berlin Olympics' hundred meters dash. A West Indian, he was the same color as the legendary winner of the event and, like Jesse Owens, more than a little conscious of the 'Aryan Master-race' poison being spewed out on every side by the Nazi propaganda machine. However, he told me, down on the track as he nervously contemplated his blocks, the two German finalists came up to him, shook his hand, wished him luck and said "All this race thing - it's not us."
Now, as we gird our loins for the Sydney 2000 Olympics' TV brainwash, we can reasonably speculate that the Mss. Jones and Miller will not be indulging in such quixotically amateur sportsmanship minutes before the starting gun. Too many big bucks are at stake. Consider this. Five months ago my granddaughters received pencil cases from an Australian friend bearing the Sydney 2000 logo and the caption 'Souvenir of the Olympics'. The cases were made in China. Today the Olympics are, before all else, a world-wide money-spinner. To deck itself out as a worthy setting for the 2000 Games, Sydney has wrenched its development priorities into the configuration of a surreal corkscrew. Urban projects already years behind schedule have been put on still more backward burners the better to pick up the gentrifying tab. The tourists will descend from the air - traffic control holding up - in their hundreds of thousands. The locals, for all that Australia is a sports crazy country (pound for pound best winner of tin pots on earth) will leave town in similar numbers. Some won't. Close to the University of Sydney's campus a small tent settlement will flap cheek by jowl with the Games' hoop-la. Inhabited by native Australians it will mirror the camp set up in Canberra seven Olympics ago and remaining ever since reminding the nation's politicos that the aborigines never surrendered sovereignty over their land. Ironically, one of Australia's best hopes for gold, the 400 meter runner Cathy Freeman is an aborigine. But not an Australian resident these days. She prefers to live and train in England. This makes her a double exception. Top British athletes prefer to train in the U.S. (on sports scholarships with the Angolans and Jamaicans: in Colorado, at altitude) or in warm South, high East, Africa. Some 'third world' superstars prefer to train in Europe where, passports arranged, they are surer of selection (for Denmark, for instance) and can send money home. The stand-out Russian swimmer, Alexander Popov, has spent the last SEVEN years in Australia, together with his coach. Which anthem will they play if he mounts the winner's podium? The athletes' agents, of course, prefer things this way, often arrange them so. Grand Prix events around the world annually hold out the possibility of a million bucks in prize money alone for a Michael Johnson or Marion Jones. That's for starters. Then comes the entire raft of sponsorship and media deals to convert such winnings into the serious money drained from the tv rights - advertising milch cow. As Leo Durocher would now put it: 'last guys finish poor.' Five rings make up the Olympic symbol but the agent is looking for six zeros. All of which is a pity. At the heart of the events there will still be wonderfully graceful, superbly honed athletes who, under the severest pressure, will demonstrate that their hearts and brains have not betrayed them when the need to go further, faster, beyond previously known limits is on them. Some will. Some won't. But, the razzamatazz forgotten for the moment, we mere on-lookers must admire both. And, in fairness, in the moment of agony-wracked triumph or desolation, not one of the competitors will be thinking of money. Then, moments later, all will be spoiled. Winners will grasp national flags and do laps of honor. The Russians will look to see if the Americans have more gold medals and the Australians look sideways at both. Losers, the first exhausted handshake of congratulation out of the way, will become sore and mutter of drugs. Winners, interviewed on camera, will favor the lens with the logo of the month. The ancient Olympic Festival Games were not about city states but individuals. The winners were heroes and feted but they had nine to fives and you could talk to them in the market. No city lobbied (or bribed) for years to become the venue. No pressure group spent a sportscaster's ransom on gaining their sport Olympic status. The Greeks did give mule-cart racing a try in their Olympiads only to reject it as lacking in dignity and respect. Today, however, sponsors should ensure that such truly pits events as synchronised swimming and beach volley ball stay in the program. What to do, then? Watch the central events. Root for individual favorites, not nations. Respect class and style wherever it was born, Cuba included. When the commercials come switch channels. When it’s volley-ball reach for a book. And if Cathy Freeman wins gold raise a glass to the memory of Jesse Owens and that long gone, long since forgotten long jumper Carl Long -possibly the best example of the true Olympic spirit to grace the Games in any city." |
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In the same Olympics, Owens was trailing to the local hero, Carl Ludwig Long, at the halfway stage of the long jump. He couldn't get his stride pattern up to the take-off board properly tight. It was the man in the gold position, Long himself, who came across and told him that, overnight, officials had relocated the board thus making a nonsense of Owens' training session markings. Adjusting his start point he sailed through the air for a world record that lasted a generation. The German silver medalist was killed outside Stalingrad.
