The Game's Up

‘You must write about this on your blog,’ said a friend. ‘You’d be so funny about it.’
I could be I suppose, but not as funny as he had already been, pointing out that however serious the protest, the attempt to put out the Olympic flame with a fire extinguisher was pure Harry Hill-type slapstick (“Who‘s tougher? Free Tibet protesters or Chinese Olympic flame protectors? Only one way to find out... FIIIIGHT!”) But faced with the whole Olympic thing all over again I cannot rustle up much humour. I feel more like Steve Bell during the worst excesses of Thatcherism, writing under his daily strip “No apologies for the absence of jokes this week.” Of course, the airwaves are full of concerned former medalists defending the IOC, all of them sounding unnervingly similar to former Olympic silver medallist Denver Mills in Little Britain and all of them singing the same tune: sport has nothing to do with politics.
Is that so? That must be why they have all those militaristic parades with flags of every nation at the start of the games, then, and why they play national anthems every time someone wins a medal, and have league tables of nations who've won the most, yes? That's just how to keep politics out of sport, eh?
The thing about the Olympics is that it is something from another era... indeed from the age before WWI, when the Edwardians thought a fine, macho, nationalistic sporting and winning jamboree was the perfect way to foster good relations between greedy, aggressive European empires. Or not, as it turned out.
To be fair to them, the IOC had given the games to Weimar Germany, not anticipating that Hitler would end up hosting them, but you know that supposedly non-existent political angle to the Games? He did, sort of, manage to find that, didn’t he?
So, a competition that got the Hitler seal of approval... and the Brezhnev thumbs up, and now Chinese Communist delight... I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with the Olympics, I suppose, if you’re really into sports and enjoy spending thirty years paying off ruinous debt for stadiums that will never be used again, but there is something badly awry with the way it‘s packaged. If the Denver Millses of the world want to have games that are free of politics, fine. Take the bloody politics out of them, then! Get rid of the flags and the anthems. If you won’t, that’s your call. But if you insist on being as naive as a Mitford sister at a Berchtesgaden tea party, don’t blub when people lay into your choice of friends.
I have been amused by the sticker-joker (allegedly Newcastle footie-fan ‘fatty Phil’) who has recrafted the London Olympic Logo as above and stuck it up all along Piccadilly. I predict that his version of the symbol will be seen more and more often in the run-up to the doomed 2012 Dome-a-thon.
As for re-packaging the Games... well, look no further than visionary Nigel Kneale, who saw their future. The Year of the Sex Olympics... now I would love to see Britain and France going, er, head to head on that one.
By the way, while I was searching for an appropriate image of Kneale’s Sex Olympics I stumbled on this very fine blog, an assembly point for lots of weird and wonderful things, including a YouTube clip of a Korean Anime version of Rugrats, in which it is made abundantly clear that distributing submachine guns to toddlers is an unwise idea. Mind you, the lead story isn't as up to date as he thinks - surfing the trains was old news in Hamburg even when I was there.