How to Save the Olympics

By Mark S. Goodman

The Olympic movement is perhaps the greatest social force in the world. It is a revolt against twentieth century materialism, it is a devotion to the cause and not the reward...It appears as a ray of sunshine through clouds of racial animosity, religious bigotry and political chicanery...

Avery Brundage

Honorary president of the

International Olympic Committee

RAY of sunshine, Mr. Brundage? In Munich, the Yugoslav water-polo team lost a close contest to the Soviet Union. Displeased by defeat, the Yugoslav sportsmen spat on the Cuban referee and beat the daylights out of his bewildered brother. Pakistan, perennial power in field hockey, was upset in the Olympic final by West Germany, 1-0. Pakistani fans nearly mobbed the referees, the players ridiculed the awards ceremony and roughed up a doctor at the doping tests, and eleven members of the team were forever banned from Olympic competition. Before the Games began, Black African nations, threatening a boycott, browbeat the I.O.C. into banning white-supremacist Rhodesia from participating. One supporter of the boycott threat was Uganda, which is currently exiling 55,000 of its Asian citizens.

Against this backdrop of political chicanery and racial animosity, in an atmosphere of intrigue and incompetence, the Arab terrorists committed their murderous assault on the Israeli athletes. Yet even apart from the horrifying massacre, the XX Olympiad has to rank as one of the sorriest athletic spectacles in history. True, hundreds of athletes did their human best, breaking dozens of world and Olympic records. Nonetheless, the impact of these extraordinary feats of strength, endurance and grace was marred by the chauvinistic stockpiling of team points, power politics, inept and prejudiced officiating, flagrant commercialism and oleaginous doses of carnival ballyhoo.

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These ills did not originate with the XX Olympiad. Since the Games were revived in 1896, they have too often been used for purposes that stray far from their professed ideal. Adolf Hitler made the 1936 Berlin Games a platform for virulent Nazi propaganda; in 1952 the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. began turning the Olympics into a cold war theater. Since then even the referees, who can do a lot of subjective mischief in judgment events like boxing, have often been chosen more for their ideological loyalty than for their skill. As proved by Munich 1972, the Games have become an extravaganza of hopelessly brobdingnagian proportions: 12,000 athletes from 124 countries competing in nearly 200 events, $650 million spent by the West German government alone, hucksters from myriad companies plugging their wares as if the Olympiad were a trade fair.

What is to be done about the Games? Can--or should --the Olympics be salvaged before the scheduled 1976 Games in Montreal? Some extremist reformers suggest that both the Winter and Summer Olympics should be canceled entirely, that each event should have its own world championship. This solution is hardly likely, if only because Montreal has been promised an Olympics and the U.S.S.R. is already pressing for Moscow Games in 1980. Others contend that the Olympics would be immeasurably improved by the elimination of "shamateurism"--a portmanteau term designed to describe the practice, common among Iron Curtain and some other countries, of subsidizing their "amateur" athletes as fully as any professionals. Those who favor such government support call for an "open" Olympics in which professional and amateur athletes would compete, much as they do in tennis and golf. Certainly some basic regulations must be updated and simplified. As it stands, the Olympic rulebook reads like a French constitution, and is just about as workable. Whatever man-made foul-ups were involved, hidebound laws and simple legislative misunderstanding contributed to such contretemps as the disqualification of U.S. Swimmer Rick DeMont and his loss of a gold medal and the ludicrous 51-50 Russian victory over the Americans in the basketball finale.

One sensible step would be simply to cut the Olympics down to governable size. A move is already under way to discard repetitive events in certain sports, notably swimming, where four basic strokes are parlayed into innumerable races. Also, it is not necessary for a nation to field three athletes in every event, as the major powers invariably do; surely, two would be sufficient. Perhaps only the world's 15 best, based on established records, should compete; team sports, such as basketball and soccer, which exacerbate national combativeness, might well be dropped; this alone would represent a giant step back toward the ancient Olympic concept of emphasizing individual performance. One tradition that must go: the constant raising of national banners and blaring of national anthems after each victory; the medals properly belong to individuals, not nations.

A more radical notion, endorsed in principle by Lord Killanin of Ireland, Brundage's successor as head of the I.O.C., is to continue the Olympic movement without a quadrennial Olympiad. As Lord Killanin points out: "There is too much concentration on the fortnight of the Games rather than on the Olympic movement, which goes on all the time." This is probably the soundest proposal of all. The Games could be spread over a longer period as well as geographically across a nation or even a group of nations. This would lessen the present emphasis on a single spectacle, thus diluting the chauvinism that clearly permeates the Games.

No innovation, great or small, is likely to be introduced until the present structure of the I.O.C., a sclerotic congeries of wealthy armchair sportsmen, is revised to include younger men -- and women -- who are athletes themselves. Time and again in Munich the competitors complained of feeling like pawns in an international power play. They have very nearly become the forgotten factor in an increasingly complex political equation. It was for them and their skills, their devotion to the ideal of pressing their bodies and minds to the outer reaches of human excellence, that the Greeks first created the Games. How much longer will the athletes be willing to sacrifice themselves for such an imbroglio? Indeed, unless the I.O.C. heeds the lessons of Munich, its blazered and cravated members will find themselves in possession of a flickering Olympic torch that no one wants to bear.

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