Jul 24 2008
The Olympics
I’m not looking forward to the next few weeks when our TV screens will be filled with the Olympic Games. I’m not a sports fan. I was never good at sport and I have very little interest in most sport. Many of my fellow Australian males think this makes me a homosexual at worst or an eccentric at best.
I understand the benefits of sport. Sport can be a good way to get exercise. It can be a good way to learn teamwork. It can be a great social experience and it can be fun.
There are also downsides. It can be a good way to get injured. It can foster over competitiveness and encourage judgemental sectarianism, with communities split in their fanatical loyalty to one side over another.
It is, of course, an activity in which human beings engage and as such is as flawed as the humans who engage in it.
My problem with sport in Australia, and it is at its worst during the lead up to and running of the Olympic Games, is that Sport is given a status far in excess of other valid human activities.
We shall hear over the next few weeks how “We” have done in the medal tally. We shall see ordinary sometimes very flawed humans lauded and criticised all over their success or otherwise in physical activity. A success largely dictated by random genetics.
“But” I hear you cry “These athletes slog their guts out to achieve their medals”.
They do and they should be praised for that and proud of themselves. My point is that we do not give the same treatment to other people who slog their guts out working for charities, working for their families or even working to achieve greatness in the arts, business, politics or other fields.
I’m not proud that most Australian’s can’t name our VC winners but they can name the captains of the cricket team. That they speak of Warnie as a hero, but don’t know who Weary Dunlop was.
After the 2000 Olympics in Sydney Gold Medal winners were awarded the order of Australia medal. People work in charity their whole lives and don’t get an AO. In my opinion this was a devaluing of the Order of Australia, but it does illustrate my point about where our society’s values lie.
I suspect that part of the obsession with the Medal Talley is that we can see our country’s name on a comparative level with the big guns of the USA and China. This in itself annoys me. We are not a world power with those countries, however much we want to be, and Olympic Medals don’t stack up beside economic or military power.
So I wonder if there are any good DVD’s in the shops to get me through the next few weeks!