DE-OLYMPICIZING THE GAMES

So why, despite such moments, are the 1996 Summer Olympics so . . . annoying?

Because great pains have been taken by the organizers, the sportscasters, the flacks, and the advertisers to make sure that this kind of event is not what the Olympics are all about. Even as Strug’s coach, Bela Karolyi, was urging her to shake off the pain (“You can do it, you can do it”), NBC’s gymnastics announcer John Tesh opined, “The last thing she should do is take that second vault.” (It was Tesh who warned at one point that ” histrionics” — by which he meant history — did not favor a particular team.) The attitude was general: The entire presentation of this year’s games has been an effort to turn an event that is nationalistic, competitive, hierarchical, cruel, obsessive, and vicious into one that is one-worldish, anti-competitive, egalitarian, smiley-faced, easygoing, and sweet. In other words, to de-Olympicize the Olympics.

Even nationalism — that staple charge against the host country — is missing this year, though there have been a few diehards accusing NBC and the press of American bias, like National Public Radio, which dug up a “professor of television” at Syracuse University to explain how the drama was being rigged for nationalistic sensibilities. In truth, the prevailing ethos has been one of weepy, whiny one-worldism. There were nights when Americans seemed less interested in their own team than in South Africa’s: Shadrack Hoff of South Africa did a Reebok commercial in which he got to introduce practically the whole team before denouncing the apartheid regime and announcing, “This is my planet.” In an astonishing performance following the U.S. men’s basketball blowout of Angola, Bob Costas upbraided those who would use the expression “like the U.S. against Angola” as a simile for a lopsided contest, reminding us that Angola is a small country with a per capita income one fortieth ours. What next? Handicapping by population and GNP?

Even those seeking to make a buck off the games would not resort to pulling the heartstrings in any but the most New Age ways. NBC paid $ 3.6 billion for the rights to televise six of the next seven Olympics and hopes to recoup it, obviously, through one wretched ad after another from its “Official Centennial Olympic Games Partners.” These have tended to take an “Imagine a world . . .” format, the worst of them being the Home Depot ads (the Olympians “teach. . . . They lead. . . . They inspire. . . . And, when the moment is right, they fly”).

In fact, it was commercialism itself — commercialism, capitalism’s lapdog! — that fostered the most extreme anti-competitive squeamishness. It was the possibility of capturing the female viewing market that led the organizers and NBC to push women’s sports as the equal of men’s for drama (which is dubious) and excellence (which is mendacious). So heavily propagandized was the American public that fully two thirds of those polled before the games thought women would be beating men in all events before too long. Tom Brokaw announced on the NBC Nightly News on July 25 that this could be the first year women take home more medals than men, as if that reflected anything other than the scheduling of more women’s events, through a sort of Olympic Title IX law. Even more absurd was TV Guide’s description of the women’s basketball team as “the other Dream Team,” as though Lisa Leslie and Teresa Edwards were the equals of Scottie Pippen and David Robinson.

The surest way to get on camera if you were a man was to play against type and break down in tears. Commentator Dick Enberg, with his “Dick Enberg’s Moments,” was the regular spigot for these displays. Enberg was charged with capturing “the stories, the drama, the emotions.” He was most enthusiastic about the Greco-Roman wrestlers, who were “unbelievably generous in showing their emotions.” Car accidents were big in Enberg’s worldview: For him, the silver medal that Greco-Roman wrestler Dennis Hall won last week was as nothing compared with the car wreck that killed his brother years ago. (Nice footage of the tombstone, by the way!) So intensive was the focus on Byelorussian tumbler Vitaly Scherbo’s wife, who was in a near-fatal car accident several months ago and spent weeks in a coma, that you could almost forget that he had won six gold medals in Barcelona four years before.

NBC’s treatment of Chinese gold medalist Li Xiaoshuang was even worse. John Tesh — yes, Tesh again — did a condescending profile straight out of the pre-politically-correct “Confucius Say” school (“Here in Atlanta his quest for honor was first met with shame”) and showed footage of Xiaoshuang fumbling the rings two nights before. Later that night, when Xiaoshuang captured the individual all-around gold after a spectacular high-bar routine, he first waved to the crowd but then, overcome by emotion, dove from public view as embarrassedly as if he were about to vomit. He stooped down behind a bench and covered his head, so that neither the crowd nor the cameras saw his teary face. Not until he was manfully composed-which took under ten seconds — did he come out of hiding and again smile at the crowd. Xiaoshuang was obsessed with honor and shame — NBC had got that right. But the network viewed it as an atavistic, freakish, maladjusted way of looking at the world.

If there is one notion that has brought together all the shameless distortions of what the Olympics are about, it is “the Dream.” Olympians are people “with the courage to dream” — not, say, one-dimensional obsessives goaded by authoritarian governments or nutty parents. People won gold medals by “following their dream” — not by getting up at 4 o’clock in the morning every day since they were eight years old. Kerri Strug’s vault, said one NBC commentator, was “an inspiration to every youngster, to every adult who has ever had a dream to do something incredible” — not an inspiration to those who are willing to face pain.

“Dreaming” has become a substitute for a whole range of terms discarded from moral vocabulary — like courage, perseverance, intelligence, strength, tolerance for boredom, preparedness. That’s what made it so revolting on the night of the Strug vault to see it replayed set to this year’s Olympic theme song, which is called “The Power of the Dream.” As if Strug’s extraordinary feat were an entitlement for those who would dream — not a vindication of those who would work.

By Christopher Caldwell