BETWEEN PREPARATIONS FOR traffic snarls, heat waves, and terrorist attacks, city officials in Atlanta had a lot to contend with during the week preceding the opening ceremonies at this summer’s Olympic Games. Yet Mayor Bill Campbell and his wife Sharon still found time to organize and host what they hoped would be one of the largest city-sponsored events in the history of Atlanta, the “In Celebration of Women” festival, held the weekend of July 13.
Over the course of two days, the city offered more than 100 different activities aimed at women, ranging from a female-led road race to free mammograms and poetry readings. Energy secretary Hazel O’Leary signed up as a headline speaker for the festival, as did Harriett Woods, the director of the National Women’s Political Caucus, and Muriel Siebert, “the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.” Lecturers, appearing in six ” Empowerment Tents” downtown, prepared seminars on topics such as “economic justice,” domestic violence, civil rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, and ” political empowerment and networking.” For entertainment, the city booked performances by a singer from a band called the Sounds of Blackness, as well as a stage show by Bosom Buddies, a “song-and-dance troupe of breast cancer survivors.”
The festival, explained Atlanta first lady Sharon Campbell, was intended to “raise awareness of the strength and spirit of women,” even as it drew attention to “the successes of women and the struggles of women.”
Fair enough. But what did it all have to do with the Olympic Games? As it turned out, most people didn’t have a clue. Of the more than 150,000 participants city officials confidently predicted would come to the event, fewer than 1,000 actually showed up. (Sharon Campbell was unfazed, declaring that “the sisterhood in the event has been great.”) But to many of those professionally involved with the Olympics — the organizers, the sponsors, and, most of all, the press — staging a tribute to institutional feminism days before the world’s largest sporting event seemed perfectly natural. With the attention of the world focused on Atlanta, a little political proselytizing was simply too tempting to pass up.
It wasn’t the first time ideologues have used the Games for grandstanding. The Olympics by its nature has always been something of a political event. Yet this year, without the tension of an ideological rivalry between East and West, the Olympics has become a forum for a more banal kind of political posturing. The route of the Olympic torch, which was carried across America, was designed to bypass a county that passed an anti-gay-rights ordinance — even as America welcomed athletes from nations that put practicing homosexuals to death. All in all, lectures on the role of race and gender in sports have replaced whipping the East Germans as a media-inspired obsession. As liberal sportswriter Frank Deford put it, “Now that we don’t have to prove our Way of Life by beating the Commies in an artificial medal competition, the Summer Games are even less compelling athletically.”
Less compelling, certainly, for many of those coyering the event. While the U.S. basketball squad, doubtless one of the most competent teams ever assembled in any sport, received relatively dismissive and sometimes hostile coverage in the days leading up to the Games, press outlets gorged themselves on stories that had little to do with actual athletic competition — a subject many reporters appeared bored with even before the opening ceremonies. Instead, countless newspaper features and magazine pieces explored the legacy of racism and the role of women in the Olympics. Newsweek ran a chart illustrating the effect of the civil-rights movement on the Games. So many stories were done on the prowess of women athletes — including a Newsweek cover and a 4,000-word piece in the New York Times Magazine – – that a poll taken in July by U.S. News and World Report showed that fully 66 percent of Americans had become convinced that female Olympians would soon beat their male counterparts in head-to-head competition. (Physiologists, meanwhile, most of whom apparently don’t read Newsweek, were less sanguine in their predictions.)
Much of the coverage of the role of women in the Games contained a barely concealed, if somewhat silly, ideological agenda. Stories meant to pump up female Olympians frequently veered off into hostile asides about the malignant influence of traditional male sports, particularly football, which was usually compared unfavorably with female athletics as warlike, exclusive, victory-centric, and therefore bad. “When women bring their values to men’s sports,” explained Donna Lopiano of the newly famous Women’s Sports Foundation in a typical quote, “you’ll see you can still be competitive, but respect your opponent rather than dealing with them as enemies.” Pop anthropology comes to the sports pages.
Television coverage in the weeks preceding the Games was, predictably, even worse. A review of features on the Olympics culled from the Media Research Center’s video library found the networks vastly more concerned with cutting- edge social questions than with mere sports. One NBC segment broadcast in July, representative of the genre, profiled the life of Alice Coachman, who won the high jump in the 1948 games, establishing the women’s record in the event at a little over five and a half feet. In the piece, titled “Olympic Glory Delayed,” Coachman was introduced as the “first black woman in the world to win an Olympic gold medal.” But, the reporter intoned, “she came home at a time when not all records by black women athletes were remembered.” The unmistakable point: Coachman’s rightful glory was obscured by the racism of the age, leaving her forgotten to history, at least until producers from NBC arrived at the scene.
Not a bad little morality tale. Except it didn’t quite happen that way. In fact, whatever indignities Alice Coachman suffered under Jim Crow (and doubtless she suffered), she was far from ignored when she returned victorious from London in 1948. Rather, she was something of a celebrity at the time, the guest of honor at a party thrown by Count Basie, feted at a ceremony held by her hometown of Albany, Ga. Her achievement was recorded in textbooks and encyclopedias. In the past two decades alone, Coachman has been featured in well over 100 news stories. In other words, the real story wasn’t half as interesting as the TV version — just as the 1996 Olympic Games may prove less interesting than the political nonsense surrounding them.
by Tucker Carlson
