In ancient Greece, the Olympics was an athletic competition between city states that only free men who spoke Greek were allowed to participate in. Furthermore, athletes had to qualify, have their name in the lists and take an oath before Zeus that they had been training for 10 months or more. Also, only the most youthful and vigorous of Greeks were allowed to participate. It was an elitist event in every sense of the word, as only upper class Greeks who met very specific criteria were allowed to participate.
As a child I had a vague unrefined dream of one day being some kind of Olympic athlete. It was borderline ridiculous, considering I had no interest in sports and limited athletic aptitude. Even if I did have an amazing athletic ability to run or swim really fast, I probably never would have made it to the Olympics. The traditional elitism of the Olympic games would have held me back.
These athletes train for hours a day, every day for years. Do you know what that sounds like to me? A job. It sounds to me like you can’t really have a job and be an Olympic athlete, which means you have to have an alternative financing method. You need a source of income, and generally it has to be a lot of income. For a lot of people, this income comes from their rich parents. Other people have sponsors or benefactors, but you can not really acquire a sponsor or benefactor until you have already demonstrated much promise in some arena of Sport.
To achieve the caliber of athleticism and skill necessary to be competitive, you also need to hire a coach, preferrably a coach who’s only job is coaching you and only for hours a day, every day for years. Coaches don’t work for free, and they don’t really work for cheap either. Furthermore, coaches are generally arrogant, elitist narcissists who only want to be known for having coached winners. You have to show them that you are worth their time, even if you are paying them.
A lot of the sports we find in the Olympic games today are the kind of sports that underprivileged kids just don’t have any opportunity to participate in in the first place. Sports such as fencing, tennis and rowing are the purview of the very rich, country-club-attending upper echelon of our society. There are other sports included in the Olympic games that are more accessible to every level of society, but high class sports are certainly favored.
The Olympic games were and are an elitist endeavor designed for rich people to amuse themselves while extorting money out of the lower classes who are convinced to adulate the athletes and purchase Olympics paraphernalia. They rope you in when you are small with promises of athletic glory and world fame. Upon your inevitable failure as a member of the working class to ever become an Olympic level athlete, you are left to buy a little hat with five rings on it and watch the Olympics on television while being bombarded by advertisements. I am not suggesting that anyone do anything to make this any less of a ridiculous elitist athletic spectacle. I’m just saying that it is one.
16 Comments
Amen.
But at least these Olympics will be held in China, a country of equal opportunity, fairness, and efforts to level the playing field for its citizens. They are a model for the world.
Why else would we reward them with the Olympics?
Apparently this is the rainy season over there and the Chinese decided that they are going to control the weather by shooting chemicals from rocket launchers, airplanes, and anti-aircraft guns into clouds.
Nice link Jay. I think the fact that the Olympics are in China this time around really shows that China is on the up and up in the international arena. (No doubt a controversial topic in itself)
The coolest part about winning the Gold in the Olympics is getting your mug on a box of Wheaties.
As a kid I was very much into the Olympics, now it bores the hell out of me. I suppose the last time I was really into it was when the first Dream Team was assembled.
Thanks Claire… I heard that U.S. Olympic athletes earn below the poverty level… So, I’ve always undermined my kid’s athletic accomplishments… Nothing destructive… I just steered them toward sports they were no good at… Anybody want to buy some curling stones and short brooms…
The Olympics have been nothing worth watching in decades. When I was a kid the networks split up the events so you could see all of them. I really have no desire to girls gymnastics. I say girls because they are teenage girls. The Olympics has become a joke and a bad joke at that.
This sounds like more class warfare babble. Pun intended. This kind of class warfare bunk is another ruse that elitist try to imbue in their less fortunate and less intelligent neighbors.
Elitists aren’t necessarily intelligent – ever hear of the volumes of inbred Roman emperors, Egyptian despots, and European monarchs that could barely stand or read let alone do something worthwhile? Will Gundabar – I hope you are a rich man because if you aren’t, then you are as dumb as the civil-war era Southerners dying to uphold the elitists’ right to not have to pay them for employment.
Why thank you for the elaboration, Jason. You are right. Elitist aren’t always smart. They just think they are – especially the liberal ones who think they know how to spend the fruits of one’s labor better than he or she who earns it. The elitist usually wields the power. In our society, the more money we send to Washington, the more power and liberty we yield to those elitists.
Frankly, I’d rather see them call the shots at the Olympic games
Indeed. I am all for small-government and low taxes, so I truly hope those remarks weren’t an attempt to incite anger in me because they do not – I agree completely.
We stray far from the point of this blog, however.
This is the perfect example why the elites run your life and the world. You spend your time posting to blogs while they actually make moves. Why don’t you get out and do something about it rather than type to nobody in your corner of the internet?
So Leeroy,
What you are saying is that your way of “getting out and doing something” involves taking the time and energy to find blogs that nobody comments on, then reading the comments, and then lastly writing a comment to inform the commentators that writing comments on blogs that nobody comments on is a waste of time.
Wait…what?
Leeroy,
I think that all this blog is pointing out is that it does take a lot of hard work, dedication, and money to achieve Olympic glory. So much in fact that its nearly impossible for underprivileged peoples to have the chance to compete.
Let me paint a picture:
Its sort of like the kid, who has parents that pay for his/her undergraduate degree and then support him/her throughout going for a Masters Degree or Law Degree. Good for them, but it would be foolish to not acknowledge that they have different opportunities than that of a kid that does not have rich parents. Different opportunities come to those higher up on the financial bracket. Seriously, do you think some African-American who grew up in the ghetto is going to have the same opportunity to achieve Olympic glory as some Richy Rich in the suburbs?
Adding on to my example:
The African-American has no father growing up and is forced to go to work at 16 to help support his mother and siblings (whether or not you agree with this–it does happen), while Richy Rich’s parents don’t allow their son to get a job and they will not only support him until he is 30 but they will pay for him to practice swimming, tennis, and fencing. Since it takes so much hard work and dedication to be an Olympian, Richy Rich does not have a job and has all the time and money he needs to do whatever he wants.
Who is to say which is better? Well, that is a discussion for another time.
Oh man! Did I just waste my time to?
It is a waste of time to tell some one who already said that they didn’t expect anyone to do anything about an issue to stop wasting their time and do something about it.
Also, I guess for Leeroy, reading the whole blog was a waste of time because he clearly didn’t.
Late to the party, as always! (Sigh)
I never really “got” sports, particularly competitive sports. It’s bad enough to go running around a straggly looking patch of grass behind the school wearing silly, short pants, but to go in front of thousands of people and hudreds of cameras (wearing silly, short pants, more often than not), in order to perform some arbitrary task that will be scored in some arcane manner, in order to recieve a little metal disk… all seems a little mad.
So what if Bobby McPrescott can run around the track 0.002 seconds faster than Davey McSpackle or what-have-you. He hasn’t really acheived anything, if you think about it, other than running in a circle slightly faster than some other equally mad dullard who similarly has a life that begins and ends at running in circles (At least until they become so old as to essentially be obsolete as far as circle-running is concerned).
At least the running in circles, or the picking up the big weights, or what-not, has an actual, defined victory condition, unlike the jump-off-a-plank-into-the-water, in which you can be condemned-to-burn-in-hellfire-for-all-eternity-on-a-bed-of-your-children’s-bones… er… lose massive amounts of points because your little toe is two degrees more to the left than it ought to be.
And so what if has “won” more medals than , it doesn’t prove bally-what-all. At the end of the day everyone goes home with nothing to show for it (really) (apart from aforementioned disks of metal), and get their grinning mugs in television advertisements and newspapers and things trying to tell Joey McEveryman to “buying das produkts!”
Not as if buying Jack Expensive brand shoes will really make me jump over random bars that I might find in my way, or that drinking Capitalist! brand pseudo-orange-flavour “sports” drink will give me the energy of a burly Kenyan (who has the energy of two Kenyans) and thereby allow me to run really quickly around specially constructed rings that I might suddenly have a pressing need to run around.
Perhaps I just can’t get past the fact that a distressing number of sports involve the wearing of silly, short pants.
Meh.
Pax vobiscum.
- R
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[...] The Olympics are here and I have not watched any of it. Nevertheless I might as well be watching since all anyone at the office wants to talk about is the goings on in Beijing. For obvious reasons, the prowess of Michael Phelps is the source of 90% of the discussion. Unless you live under a rock you know about his 6 for 6 Gold Medal count thus far, with two more events to go. The other 10% of Olympic discourse is reserved for the ridiculous backyards of the woman beach volleyball players. Do yourself a favor and exploit Google Images. [...]