The best Olympics ever

August 19th 2008 – After 10 days of Olympic competition, three aspects of Beijing’s Games have maintained international attention. Firstly, the pretty little girl that didn’t sing as opposed to the ugly one that did. Secondly, the unfathomable amounts of money spent by the Chinese gouvernment to hold these Games. Finally, the mutant called Phelps and his status as greatest person to ever do anything in the universe.

Let us begin with the supposed controversy that the opening ceremonies involved trickery and deceit. Apparently, the little girl who sang the Chinese people’s anthem was only lip-synching to the lyrics of another little girl backstage. The western world has understood the concept of a pretty face presenting the work of an intellect in the shadows for at least a century. All western politicians have legions of speechwriters, image consultants, clothing experts and media liaisons to make the man (or black man) in power SEEM like the cleanest, best, friendliest and most confident leader possible. Furthermore, new media technologies now offer us the possibility of only seeing pretty people on television and in movies. They are not necessarily singing or acting as much as posing and mouthing at the camera. Fortunately, that is all we really want. We know of their marketing and manipulation tactics yet we are not outraged at MTV because they airbrushed an artist or at the shopping network trying to sell us a steak knife that cuts through cement. Why is China evil when they employ the exact same marketing tactics we’ve had for decades? And NO, it is not different because they are children. Regardless of what people say, not all kids are beautiful and you will notice that only the pretty ones have their faces displayed in the picture frames at Sears.

Also, some of the fireworks we saw on television during the ceremony were actually pre-recorded rather than live. Fireworks are unpredictable (wind, humidity, fog, misfires) and thus they backed up their multimillion-dollar display with recorded footage. Of the two billion people who watched the event, only a handful of zealous journalists noticed and exactly no one cared until the media told them to. The only difference it made was that we were much more entertained than if the thick smog hid the fireworks display.

On another note, the other day I saw Hugh Laurie stick his hand in someone’s open chest and pull out a tapeworm. I surprisingly still enjoyed the episode of house, knowing it was a plastic torso and worm. I also watched professional wrestling and could totally see that their punches weren’t landing. I was so disillusioned that I vowed to only watch sports that weren’t fixed in advance like boxing, televised poker and Baseball. My naïve self expected non-stop live presentation of realistic people in realistic situations from my television. I was sorely disappointed that Star Trek was not live feed from the International Space Station. Television is the fakest presentation of fake things happening to fake people (double all the fakes for reality television). There is nothing wrong with that, otherwise we would look out the window or go out instead of watch a fat person lose two pounds and cry for 35 minutes.

(I am kidding, nothing could ever convince me to watch baseball).

Moving on.

The Chinese Olympic Committee and the Chinese government have allegedly spent billions of dollars on these games. Just the opening ceremonies cost a cool 100 million dollars for a 4-hour show. Some people may frown upon a third-world nation that spends a percentage of its GDP on a two-week party but I say nay. The Chinese have an image to keep up and doing so requires them to spend more money, use more performers and win more gold medals than we can possibly imagine. In a measly four years, they have built massive sports infrastructure and developed competitive talent in sports they hadn’t even heard of a few years ago (see canoeing). I will not be ethnocentric and impose my values of democracy, human writes and feeding children on Hu Jintao and the Communist Party of China.

That’s right, we must not forget that China is a communist nation. As such, China spends more on international image than on rural infrastructure or long-term economic development (It worked well for the USSR). It is unfortunate but the evidence is there. Actually, they are not necessarily hypocritical about their designs by hiding them. It’s just that very little people speak Mandarin in the Western World and so we may instinctively think they are hiding something. We might have to wait a century before Chinese languages prevail over English and thus we will be one happy homogenous family (unlike the failure of the British, German, French, Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Russian, Swedish, Japanese and American empires before).

Finally,

These Olympics, we have been treated to the greatest amount of Gold Medals by a single athlete in a single Games ever. Michael Phelps has continuously volunteered for drug testing on top of mandatory tests therefore we cannot accuse him of any wrongdoing (Unless American chemists have developed undetectable performance-enhancers… I am just being paranoid, it could never happen). He seemingly deserves these medals and congratulations to him. It was exhilarating to see him swim and win until I noticed an odd trend. People are huddled around televisions to see the human-dolphin hybrid swim and are overwhelmed with emotion when he shatters the world record in a particular event. The thing is, he DESTROYED the Olympic record in one event and shattered the world records in the other 7. Furthermore, the other competitors that would invariably finish on the silver and bronze medal positions would also smash their personal best, national best and world record… I thought that world records where these limits of human performance that were only rarely pushed by a small increment… Have these swimmers been holding back dramatically during practice and competitions in the last decade or is there something more nefarious at work here. My suspicion is based on metaphysics rather than facts but here goes: I insinuate that the Chinese desire for ratings and notoriety is behind this. By somehow reducing the water resistance in their pool, even by a percent or two, they could guarantee the establishment of new and unbeatable records. Hence, we would be talking about the Beijing swimming events for the next few decades. Think about it, it sounds like they would have the resources and motive to do this… they are clearly hiding something.

Michael Phelps has the most gold medals and this criterion seems to be enough to designate him as the best Olympian of all time. Here are some other factors to be taken into account:

- Today’s wet suits have substantially decreased record times.
- In the first few Olympic games, swimming events took place in open sea.
- For an athlete competing in the triathlon, he would have to compete for 32 years to get 8 gold medals. There is one triathlon per Olympics and 497 swimming events.
- Half of the planet’s countries have little access to water (Africa), much less an Olympic swimming delegation. However, every country can run the 100 meters.
- The Chinese did something with the water.
- Former Olympians Pieter Van Den Hogenband and Ian Thorpe were not competing, leaving Phelps with relatively no competition.

I am not saying that Phelps’ accomplishment is not among the greatest athletic achievements of all time. I am just trying to nuance the absolutist terminology used by worldwide media this week (best, legend, God, Greatest, fish-boy).

My Gold medal for BEST Olympian still goes to Jesse Owens, a black man who won 4 gold medals (athletics) under Hitler’s nose in the 1936 Berlin games. He was constantly berated and jeered by the spectators celebrating their official German racism yet ran and jumped well ahead of his Aryan competitors. Once he came back to the United States as an Olympic hero, he was generously rewarded with a lucrative and dignified career racing against horses on a track. Life and History are generally unfair but it definitely sucks more for some.

Happy Olympic season, it is the greatest…

(Pictured: Jesse Owens, One-upping the Nazis - Freedom officers looking on at the pre-recorded fireworks display - Michael Phelps, NOT experiencing the side-effects of performance-enhancers)

End.