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Whatever Happened to the Olympics

Written by Keith Zakheim |

I was six when Al Michaels’s iconic “Do you believe in miracles?” call reverberated all the way from a hockey barn in Lake Placid to Moscow’s Red Square, symbolically striking a chink in the armor of the Iron Curtain. Ground zero of the Cold War moved to Los Angeles in 1984, and despite the Soviets not showing up to the party, my patriotic heart swelled every time Carl Lewis stepped up to the podium to receive his gold medals. And in the aftermath of the revolution against Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics and 12 men forever known as the Dream Team served as an exclamation point to America’s newfound hegemonic status atop the world.

 

From its inception in 1896 in Athens, the modern Olympics has served as a proxy battlefield in which rival nations can pursue vendettas and settle grievances without resorting to armies, missiles or warfare. Instead of charging each other’s trenches with bayonets at the ready, France and Germany had an outlet for national pride that involved throwing javelins towards the outfield and not at each other. It was Jesse Owens who struck the first blow for freedom against the Nazi machine in 1936, at a time when Hitler’s plan for world domination seemed inevitable. And in the aftermath of the murder of eleven Israeli Olympic athletes at the Munich Olympics of 1972, it was a modern-day Maccabee, Mark Spitz, whose gold medal haul helped alleviate the Jewish community’s grief.

 

Fast forward to 2016, and I don’t even know when the Olympics begin. I can’t name one American athlete outside of the basketball team, and I have read more about the threat of the Zika virus then I have about our decathletes. As far as I know, Hamas, Hizbollah, Al Qaeda and ISIS are not fielding teams, and as much as Donald Trump tries to make Mexico our foil, I wish the Mexican athletes the same good fortune as I do the ones wearing the Red, White and Blue.

 

If anything, the Olympics still reflects our geopolitical reality but it does so by omission – the “non-state actors” (the phrase by which foreign policy experts refer to terrorists and other extra-national groups) don’t field teams. Just as our enemies are not visible on the traditional battlefield, they are also unrepresented at the Olympic games. If past Olympics were war by other means, this summer’s games in Brazil will hopefully be peace by other means from the contemporary plague of fundamentalism, zealotry and murder.

 

If the cost of a peaceful international scene is an Olympic games bereft of nationalistic zeal and jingoistic tension, then it is well worth the price.  But I do miss the days of Mary Decker Slaney running against Apartheid and Mary Lou Retton vaulting over and around her Communist competitors. Oh well, at least the baseball All-Star game still means something…