The Weekly Screed (#830)

Black Tidings greet the next Olympics
by David Benjamin

“We shall not have peace until the prejudices that now separate the different races shall have been outlived. To attain this end, what better means than to bring the youth of all countries periodically together for amicable trials of muscular strength and agility?”
                                             — Pierre de Coubertin

MADISON, Wis. — Olympic Games traditionalists were in a state of deep despondency recently when word leaked out that the city of Tokyo had snagged the 2020 Games without greasing a single member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). This act of unseemly integrity threatened to send the Olympic movement plummeting down a slippery slope that could end its cherished heritage of greed, waste, bloat, cronyism, cheating, tasteless grandiosity and rampant drug abuse.

Since then, however, it was revealed that the Tokyo bidders had edged out Istanbul and Madrid by funneling a few rice bales full of yen through a Singapore outfit called Black Tidings — God bless the IOC! You can’t make this stuff up! — and a guy named Papa Massata Diack (really!), whose papa used to run the International Athletic Association Federation. Besides acting as the grifter for both Brazil’s and Japan’s Olympic graft, Papa Diack — dubbed the “Keyser Söze of sports marketing” by The Guardian — is presently dodging French authorities, who want him for bribery, corruption and money-laundering. The Black Tidings syndicate, meanwhile, is reputed to be hip-deep in Vladimir Putin’s epic multi-Olympic doping scam.

In other words, we be cool. Olympic tradition is alive and well and hiding out at a soapland in Kabukicho.

Tradition will also rule when the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) slouches toward Tokyo with its usual skeleton crew and a whole lot of urine cups. WADA’s sleuths will again be doggedly testing for substances that cheaters no longer use because they’ve moved on to a new generation of performance-enhancing drugs (PED) that are less detectable and far more potent.

But WADA, bless its heart, plugs away. Sometime in late 2021, WADA will discover tiny traces of the new PEDs in fluid samples that its pee-stained minions didn’t have time to test during the Games. The result will be dozens of gold medals taken away from scofflaws and mailed (only slightly tarnished) to the losers who didn’t get to stand on the podium and hear their national anthems.

In the end, thanks to the IOC, WADA and the miracle of modern pharmaceutical science, the Tokyo spectators who traveled thousands of miles, paying inflated airfares, staggering hotel rates and exorbitant ticket prices, will sit in the bleachers waving tiny flags, but also wondering: How many of these sleek-muscled, Nike-branded demigods swimming back and forth or scurrying around the track are juiced to the gills and higher than a kite can fly oh me oh my. The lucky fans will be those who attend the all-steroid weightlifting venue and the various blood-doping bicycle derbies, where every jock is shooting up daily and masking brilliantly. And all the world knows. And nobody cares, especially the International Oligarchic Committee.

In 2020, no one — especially the shills on NBC — will recall that Olympic tradition used to be somewhat less sleazy. In 1896, when Pierre de Coubertin revived the Olympics, not one of the athletes was a millionaire. In fact, they weren’t even paid to play, ever. That was an actual rule. Olympic officials took away Jim Thorpe’s medals when they learned he had played semi-pro baseball (not even an Olympic sport then) one summer while he was in college.

Another quaint tradition way back then was that Olympians competed individually in contests whose results were readily discernible with finish lines and tape measures. Think Chariots of Fire. It was all races, leaps and tosses then, not dances and dives with “artistic elements” performed before judges with political agendas and open palms. Coubertin included no sports in the Olympics that required subjective judgment by astigmatic umpires because… well, who knows? He was silent on this issue probably because no one would have been silly enough to suggest it.

Coubertin, almost certainly, would have deemed it unseemly for winners to wrap themselves in their country’s flag and sweat all over it while strutting around the stadium, taunting defeated rivals and basking in the tribal arousal of their countrymen.

But traditions change. The earliest modern Olympics were modest, thrifty and almost neighborly. In 2020, the glut of sports that ravaged Rio de Janeiro will not be enough for Tokyo. There’s gonna be more, more! — more geography, more spending and more shuttling of glassy-eyed spectators (“If it’s Tuesday, it must be horses, ridden by rich people, jumping over giant shrubs”). In all, there will be 324 events in 32 sports. Among the new thrills are karate, which will probably prove to be unwatchable, sport climbing, whatever that is, and two pastimes — surfing and skateboard — that make fans like me nostalgic for Jim McKay and “Wide World of Sports”… barrel-jumping at Grossinger’s, cliff-diving in Acapulco, the “agony of defeat” guy bouncing down the hill…

Expect, by 2024, for the IOC to seriously consider going whole-hog on “Wide World”-type stuff… hot-dog eating, ultimate frisbee, miniature golf, dwarf-tossing, topless Jell-O wrestling, synchronized croquet, perhaps a pogo-stick marathon and — here’s one that just might eclipse the TV ratings for pixie gymnastics — the 60-meter unicycle dash on a tightrope over a crocodile pit.

Alas, one tradition that will be difficult to continue in Tokyo will be the bulldozing of slums and the displacement of thousands of poor people to make way for an “Olympic village” that will later become luxury condos for rich people who can afford shrub-jumping horses. Tokyo doesn’t have any major slums — at least not now. However, that might change after the catastrophic recession that now, traditionally, follows hot on the heels of the host nation’s Olympic folly.