Hubris and the Beijing Olympic Games

My ancestors created a fire in honour of the sun god Zeus that was kept burning at Olympia, the home of the ancient Olympics, during the course of the Games.

They also coined a word ‘hubris’, which explains why the modern Olympic torch relay has become a hostage to protest groups expressing their hostility to China’s policies in Tibet.

Olympia, where the ancient Olympics were held, is a tranquil, slightly mysterious place. There are wide, open grass fields with their silent echoes of past triumphs, where events like the wrestling, boxing and races, sometimes with athletes in armour but more often in the nude, took place.

Overlooking the fields of competition, literally and metaphorically, are green-dark hills with eerie gusts of steams rising from them.

For the competitors at the ancient Olympics, these hills were the home of the gods who controlled their destiny. As Pindar wrote: “Fate has written that we shall run.”

Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, wanted to restore the values inherent in the ancient Games throughout the long course of their 292 Olympiads.

His central ideas were the notions that participating was more important than winning; that the individual contests at the Games should be a substitute for war — the ideal of the Olympic Peace — and that the athletic contests should be elemental events where faster, higher and longer were the ideals.

According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, hubris is “(Gk Tragedy) overweening pride towards the gods leading to nemesis.” Surely this is what has happened with the marketing and organization of the modern Olympics?

Take the torch relay event, as an example.

The original religious event at Olympia was brought back to the modern Olympics by the Nazis for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin to perpetrate their odious racial myth of Aryan supremacy.

The propaganda film, “Olympia”, with its faux vestal virgins and shots of blond-haired Adonises striding through Europe, makes this connection clear.

The Athens 2004 Olympics, which were problematical for many reasons, were given a boost with the introduction of a global torch relay through 27 countries.

This was a further example of the tendency of the modern Olympic movement to adopt the principle that nothing exceeds like excess. This tendency, as the protests in London, Paris and San Francisco have shown, and undoubtedly show in Canberra, have given protesters a grand stage to make their anger resound around the world.

The long time IOC powerbroker and former Australian Olympian Kevan Gosper has said that in the future, torch relays should be limited to the Olympic host country. Gosper created a controversy during the torch relay for the 2000 Sydney Olympics by allowing the switch for the first handover in Australia from an Australian-Greek young woman to his own 11 year-old daughter, who was technically ineligible because of her age (or lack of age).

For many people, this gesture symbolized the hypocrisy that has perverted the Olympic movement from its purer roots going back to Olympia.

The Games are now so bloated with an edifice-complex that forces cities to virtually bankrupt themselves when they hold an Olympics.

The Olympic ideals have been perverted with unedifying commercialism (the swimsuit controversy is an example), crass nationalism and rampant drug cheating.

All these factors were in play when the IOC awarded the 2008 Olympic Games to Beijing. The Olympic movement is now acknowledging that this decision was a mistake. But this is only because the protesters supporting human rights in Tibet have managed to stage some spectacular protests.

This brings us back to some more wisdom from the ancient Greeks: “Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first grant them their wishes.”

Should the IOC be reformed into a more democratic organization? Is this possible? Or are the games up for an Olympic movement that truly reflects the Olympic ideals?

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