The Olympic spirit, RIP

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Aug 16, 2024

Like so many American boys, I was thoroughly absorbed with sports in my youth. When I wasn’t playing games, I was reading about athletes and daydreaming about future athletic glory. Every four years I would be thrilled just by reading about the Olympic Games (since there was no TV in our home), and inspired by the achievements of these amazing amateurs, who competed simply for the joy of the sport.

Or did they? As I grew older, took up competitive tennis, and had a chance to meet a few of the world’s leading players, I noticed that some of them supported themselves—and wives and children—on the income as “amateurs.” After the Olympics, the big winners might see their faces on Wheaties boxes, or earn money on endorsements, or sign lucrative professional contracts. Well, why not, I figured.

But something was lost in the process. Other the years, the Olympic Games have lost any real sense of amateurism (at least in the events that draw the best television ratings). Runners compete year-round for prize money, and the Olympics are just one more stop on the world tour. Swimmers train full-time, under the guidance of professional coaches, drawing wages from no-show jobs. And the basketball players are no longer future NBA stars; they are the same players who make $20 million a year as professionals.

Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that the Olympic Games would lose much of their luster. There is nothing inherently wrong with professional sports, but there is a purity in amateur competition that professional leagues cannot match. Come to think of it, “purity” is a word that no one would associate with the Paris Olympics.

St. Thomas Aquinas said that there are two activities men undertake purely for their own sake: contemplation and play. The pure joy of play is so elemental, so primal, that it clearly involves something essential to the human condition. There is nothing more natural, more innocent, than little boys challenging each other, to see who can run the fastest or jump the highest or throw a ball the furthest, and I pity a grown man who cannot rejoice in the same sort of friendly competition (even if he might regret it the next day).

One of my favorite movies, Chariots of Fire, beautifully shows both the joys and the dangers of amateur competition, in the lives of two British runners from the 1924 Olympics (which by the way were also held in Paris). Harold Abrahams takes a methodical, almost professional approach toward sprinting; he is a serious, honorable, determined competitor. Eric Liddell, on the other hand, runs because he loves to run. He tells his sister: “I believe God made me for a purpose. But he also made me fast. And when I run, I feel his pleasure.” There it is: that primal joy, the sense of having done one’s utmost, a deep and lasting pleasure that cannot be produced by a paycheck.

The joy of sports, St. Thomas would tell us, comes in the play itself, not in the results: not in the prospect of fame and endorsement and a professional contract, not even in winning a gold medal. So the more we move away from the essence of amateur competition, the more we dilute that pure joy.

Even for this interested observer, the most satisfying Olympic memories have involved little-known athletes who emerged from obscurity: Abebe Bikila, the Ethiopian who ran barefoot through the streets of Rome to win the marathon in 1960; John Aki-Bua, the relatively unknown Ugandan who surprised two heavy co-favorites in the 400-meter hurdles in 1972; and of course the US hockey team that stunned an overconfident Russian squad in the Winter Olympics of 1980. The exultant celebrations of these unexpected winners were a delight to see. Contrast them with the ill-concealed disappointment of the swimmer who captures a gold medal but fails to better his own world record.

No doubt there were moments of that same pure joy for some of the competitors in the Paris Olympics. Good for them. But the big-business approach has made the Olympic Games a crass commercial spectacle. The blasphemous opening ceremonies were not an aberration; the Games have lost their innocence.