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Maxed out 1703

A (1998) post-Olympic report
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I'm on holiday, lost in the jungles of Costa Rica. There's no truth to the rumour the trip is VANOC's first installment in the Shut Him Up fund, though I am a bit concerned about getting back into the country. In case the Internet and I haven't connected or jaguars have eaten my computer, here's an encore performance of a previous Olympic-themed column to keep the ball rolling.

 

And the winner is....

Winners and losers have been much in the news for the past couple of weeks. The spectacle of the Olympics has this way of making even the lesser sports-minded among us focus on winning and losing.

So who won and who lost?

Ironically, the biggest winner wasn't the Games in Nagano. The Iraqi people won the biggest prize of all. The Olympics afforded them the chance to miss being bombed even further into the Dark Ages. The United Nations, agreed to wait until the Olympics were over before unleashing the dogs of war to ensure peace. This could have been a humanitarian gesture but I suspect members of the Security Council had some side bets on Olympic events and wanted them to unfold without interruption.

Postponing the Crusade created winners and losers though. CNN, NewsWorld and other all-news stations lost big audiences who would have otherwise been glued to their screens to see the first-hand carnage of "smart" bombs surgically obliterating their targets. This loss of big-bang news meant CBS, who carried the Olympics in the USA, was a winner, of sorts. Actually, CBS was a loser since they managed to bore people out of their minds in record numbers with their jingoistic, Disneyesque Olympic Moments, but if more people had been watching the UN synchronized aerial bombing team taking out Iraqi daycare centres, CBS would have had an even bigger stinker on their hands.

Canada was a huge winner. The podium ceremonies for new Olympic sports were dominated by maple leafs. Canucks brought home gold in snowboarding, not without controversy but finally giving some meaning to this year's Whistler Blackcomb slogan, "Higher Ground". And a team of very nice ladies from Regina mined gold in curling. Their victory proved not all Olympians need be young and well-muscled. It also showed the world there is at least one highly popular, competitive sport even less well suited to television than snooker.

It would have been nice to see the Canadian women's hockey team put the hurt on the U.S. and cinch Canada's place in the U.S. psyche as the new, post-cold war, sports boogie monster, but the puck fell the other way. Silver was a respectable finish though, and more important than who won - something never said by the team who actually wins - was level of play, the skill and finesse on the ice and the strangely arousing sight of women in big pads body checking the snot out of each other. You've come a long way, baby; don't hurt me.

As is the case with most of us, I'm much more familiar with losing than winning. To me, that's possibly the most perverse thing about sport. We're all more familiar with losing than winning. It's inevitable.

Maybe that's why I feel a certain kinship with the Canadian men's hockey team. Well, at least as much kinship as I can feel with guys twice my size who make more in three 20 minute periods than I make in, well, this lifetime. Canada's NHL players were the big losers. Huge losers actually. Losers on a cosmic scale difficult for anyone who isn't an astrophysicist to fully comprehend.

For years, the Canadian and U.S. Olympic hockey teams complained about how it wasn't fair to pit real amateur hockey players, college players, against Eastern Bloc players who were amateur in name only, state soldiers whose unfortunate duty it was to play hockey 12 months a year to defend their country's way of life. If only we could send our best hockey players, we'd show them which end of the stick is up, the lament went.

So this year we did. Oh, the humiliation. The USA NHL players went down easy, steamrollered by the Canucks just like the script said. But then, Canada's finest got bounced by the Czechs, a team staffed with several players who didn't make the cut with the Vancouver Canucks for chrissakes. And just when we thought it couldn't get much worse, it did.

I'm not sure why someone didn't suggest the Canadian men play the Canadian women at that point. The way the men were playing, it might have been a pretty good game. If they'd have won, they could have left Nagano with a shred of dignity. If they'd have lost, I'm sure one of them would have said, "Hey, at least we gave it 110 per cent out there; the other team just wanted it badder."

Of course, the biggest loser of all was the Olympic ideal. Higher, faster, stronger was kicked pretty hard in the groin by the International Olympic Committee and their on-going, festering road show of greed, corruption and hypocrisy. The IOC is the undisputed gold medal winner in those competitions.

It wasn't their inane act of stripping Ross of his gold medal for having a concentration of pot in his blood only slightly higher than the concentration of intelligence in the collective executive committee that made them a loser. It was a performance worthy of gold in hypocrisy though, wasn't it?

And it wasn't the spectacle of blatantly corrupt judging in some of the more subjective sports. Although let's be honest, ice dancing is no more a "sport" than ballroom dancing is. Why it's in the Winter Olympics at all is at least as much a mystery as how beach volleyball got into the Summer Games.

It wasn't even the graft thrown at the IOC members by the Nagano organizers, the free holidays, the gifts, the pandering, the yen for Yen. These, after all, were just the final act that started with wining and dining and bribery to get the Games in the first place.

I guess it's all those things taken together. Whatever lofty goals it had in the beginning, the IOC has become a pimp, the Olympic spectacle its prostitute. Like johns on any street in any town anywhere in the world, bidnezmen at this moment are lining up to buy its wares, their interest in sport virtually immeasurable compared to their interest in Olympic commerce.

Seems to me we have to ask ourselves if this is really the kind of action we want coming to our town?