The 2018 Winter Olympic Games have opened in the mountains of northeastern South Korea. The next two weeks will showcase some of the finest athletes in the world: men and women who’ve trained relentlessly and, whether they win a medal or not, deserve our esteem and best wishes. The United States has sent 244 competitors—109 women, 135 men—and we have every reason to think they will bring credit to our country.
Yet we will not enjoy these games with an untroubled conscience. Stories of sexual abuse and rampant cheating are everywhere in the news, both here and abroad—more so this year than in years past. The Olympics have become so scandal-ridden and cynically unsportsmanlike as seriously to raise the question of why we continue them.
The most immediate problem of this year’s games arises from their location. Pyeongchang is a beautiful place, and South Korea has every reason to exhibit its culture and economy. But its northern neighbor is a bloodthirsty regime that starves its people, rules them by terror, and blackmails free nations with threats of nuclear war. No game should include North Korea as a participant. Yet not only has the Kim regime sent athletes to Pyeongchang, it has dispatched its propaganda orchestra, a massive cheerleading squad, and several “dignitaries” whom the United States has sanctioned for human-rights abuses. In some events, moreover, North and South are fielding a combined “Korean” team, giving the world’s most sinister regime a form of de facto equivalence with its democratic neighbor. The Pyeongchang games are a public relations coup for the Kim crime family.
Team USA bears marks of shame, too. In recent months, Americans have learned with horror about the crimes of Larry Nassar, a team doctor for USA Gymnastics. Nassar has been given multiple life sentences for sexually abusing scores of young girls—more than 150 have publicly accused him—over the course of nearly two decades. But USA Gymnastics weathered the scandal virtually unscathed. Yes, its board was forced to resign, and its staff will now be required to undergo training in how to spot abuse. That’s no proper punishment for an organization that ruined hundreds of young lives in pursuit of a few extra pieces of gold, silver, and bronze.
Cultures of abuse have long characterized women’s gymnastics and figure skating. Joan Ryan’s 1995 book Little Girls in Pretty Boxes detailed the multilayered miseries already being endured by America’s girl Olympians a generation ago: eating disorders, depression, alienation from friends and family, and a firm step on the path to failure in later life.
What drives all this twisted behavior is, of course, an adherence to a win-at-any-cost philosophy of sports. The nations of the West upheld the ideal of amateurism for nearly a century after the creation of the modern Olympics in 1896. “Sport, which still keeps a flag of idealism flying,” wrote the English novelist John Galsworthy in 1923, “is perhaps the most saving grace in the world at the moment, with its spirit of rules kept, and regard for the adversary, whether the fight is going for or against.” The line was a favorite of Avery Brundage, the American president of the International Olympic Committee from 1952 to 1972.
But in the affairs of nations, the spirit of sportsmanship was no match for the lust for prestige. The Olympic Games have long been just another form of cultural warfare. Cheating was probably part of them from the beginning. Heinrich “Dora” Ratjen passed himself off as a female high jumper at the 1936 Olympics, and for decades Western amateurs had to compete against Soviet bloc athletes who pretended to be amateurs but were in fact employed by their states. The Red Army maintained its own sports arm.
Rules requiring amateur status for Olympians were relaxed after Brundage’s retirement in 1972 and finally discarded in 1992. Since then, the United States—and most other nations—have fielded fully professional teams. This has enhanced the athletic performance and our medal haul, but it has made the whole enterprise aggressive and unscrupulous and, concomitantly, less appealing to the ordinary spectator.
Doping is endemic. The list of athletes disqualified for cheating grows longer with each Olympics. After the 2012 summer games in London, for instance, more than 100 athletes were either barred from competition or had their medals stripped for doping violations. The Pyeongchang games have an outright ban on the Russian team, so flagrantly and consistently has Putin’s state organized doping for its athletes. And yet the ban isn’t quite a ban: The International Olympic Committee has allowed 168 Russians to compete under a “neutral flag” so long as they can prove they haven’t used banned substances.
The Russians are the preeminent violators, but the United States is far from guiltless; Lance Armstrong and Marion Jones are sadly anything but exceptions.
The Olympic Games have long since fallen victim to the mercenary spirit of professionalization that afflicts every sport when fame and money creep in. But “professionalization” isn’t quite the right word. The possibility of lucrative sponsorship contracts and global fame entices young athletes to give themselves to a sport they almost certainly can’t make a steady living by once their metabolisms decelerate. Some manage to stay in their sports by coaching; many others don’t know where to turn, their aspirations abandoned like the empty Olympic stadiums and sports complexes that dot the outskirts of Rio and Seoul and Montreal.
Can anything be done?
Some Olympic teams clearly require more stringent oversight by governing boards. The abuses rampant within USA Gymnastics must have been quietly ignored by large numbers of people. The United States Olympic Committee, for instance, was informed of Nasser’s crimes as early as 2015 but took none of the necessary actions. The problem wasn’t structural but cultural. The Olympics are a multibillion-dollar business. Hence the cheating scandals, the violent and repugnant behavior both on and off the field, and the heartbreaking stories. Every reform idea deserves debate, but real reform will be a time in coming. For now Americans are best advised to turn their attentions to more local competitions.
We’re put in mind of Alypius, the friend of Saint Augustine who felt he could not bear Rome’s cruel and bloodthirsty gladiatorial matches. A few of Alypius’ companions dragged him to the arena, but he refused to watch, keeping his eyes fast shut. But when he heard the roar of the crowd, he could contain himself no longer and opened his eyes. “He fell,” Augustine recalls in the Confessions, “and fell more pitifully than the man whose fall had drawn that roar of excitement from the crowd.”
The Olympic Games are not gladiatorial matches, but neither are they altogether free of the moral quandaries that dogged the conscience of Alypius. Americans may wish to learn from his mistake and, when they hear NBC’s Olympic theme, turn off the television.
