Rio Gets the Games (October 2009)

(I wrote most of this on October 9, 2009 right after teh IOC announced that Rio de Janeiro had been awarded the 2016 Summer Games. But I got bored, and did finish it until recently...)

I used to love the whole idea of the Olympics. They seemed special, suffused with seriousness of purpose and immense historical significance. But little by little, I became disillusioned and cynical.

There was Munich. There were the boycotts. There were the scandals involving bribery of IOC members.

And as time went on, there was the increasingly poor (in the U.S.) TV coverage of the Olympics, as networks who had paid billions for the right to do so focused more and more on selling human interest stories, primarily involving U.S. athletes deemed to have star power, and less and less on sport. While I'm not inclined to give the networks a break, I'll admit that the Olympics have become ridiculously diverse and virtually uncoverable. There are so many sports in so many locales that you can almost forgive NBC for wanting to turn Beijing into the Michael Phelps show. Notice, I said "almost."

As for track and field, well, there was always plenty of coverage of the sprints. And every once in a while, there might be a few laps of a distance race sandwiched in among commercials. During the Beijing Olympics, I read about and followed the athletics competition online, and then would occasionally tune in twelve hours later to see what races NBC would feature on their evening broadcast. Of course, one could look forward to many hours of teasers for these events, which always seemed to occur in the final half hour of coverage, ensuring that I would also see as many commercials as possible. But given how much the network had paid to broadcast the games, they didn't want to take any chances.

The truth is, I basically didn't watch the Beijing Olympics at all. I thought that perhaps I was no longer a fan of the sport, that I had outgrown it or something. But a year later, after watching the 2009 Track and Field World Championships, I realized I was still a fan of track and field, but no longer a fan of the Olympics. Too much hype, too much jingoism, too many sports, too many dignitaries, too many flags, too many mascots -- and too much money at stake before, during, and after.

So this week, leading up to the vote in Copenhagen to award the 2016 games, I found myself taken aback by the parade of people who felt this "competition" to host the games was so important. For several days, every time I turned on the radio there were people being interviewed about which city, which country, which continent was most deserving.

In the end, Chicago was eliminated from consideration in the first round of final voting, receiving only 18 votes of support, behind Madrid, Tokyo, and Rio de Janeiro. It turned out that despite the lobbying efforts of the first family, Chicago wasn't the second city, it was the fourth. Ouch!

Well, good try and all that. And good luck to Rio, whose government has pledged 14 billion dollars to prepare for the games, which, we presume will include trying to address the city's high crime rate. I'm sure we can all look forward to years of stories about the challenges of staging the games in Rio. So far, London seems to be getting a free pass (as a former host city, maybe it's immune from that kind of coverage).

As for the athletes, I wish them all well with their Olympic dreams, but I also know they'll go on training and competing in or out of the spotlight. As for me, I couldn't care less who has the games of 2020... or 2056, when it will take an entire continent to host all 182 separate Olympic sports, including boogie boarding, Frisbee golf, and lawn darts. The competition to host the Olympics doesn't interest me.

I competition on the track WOULD interest me, if they would only show more of it.