The Olympics are always complicated. As viewers, we want to believe the hype — we want to believe in the magic and innocence of the games. But we know there’s a dark side. The Olympics has never been just good, clean fun.
Think of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, documented by Hitler’s filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl. African-American track star Jesse Owens won Olympic gold and glory but faced segregation back home — while World War II loomed on the horizon. Think of how hosting the 2004 Summer Games decimated the Greek economy, or how dissident artist Ai Weiwei helped design the stunning “Bird’s Nest” stadium for the 2008 Beijing Games before being arrested, or how just after the Sochi Olympics, Vladimir Putin nabbed a piece of Ukraine’s sovereign territory.
The International Olympic Committee recently decided to uphold the ban on the Russian track-and-field team but to allow the international federations for the 28 other Olympics sports to decide on each Russian athlete’s participation in next month’s Rio Games individually. Some have called the decision cowardly and view it as a failure to stand up to Putin.
In some ways, that response makes sense. After all, it turns out, from Richard McLaren’s independent report commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency, that the Russian team has been not simply turning a blind eye but actively facilitating doping on a wide-scale basis since at least 2011, and most likely earlier.
But that response also misses the point that there’s a larger tragedy here: What are the human consequences when a state mandates full-scale doping? Let’s think about what this policy of doping tells us about Russia. Whistleblower Yulia Stepanova joined the cause of her husband, Vitaly, once she was injured before the London Games in 2012. Russian officials stopped doctoring her drug tests after she was of no further use to her country. She tested positive, naturally, and was put on suspension in 2013.
I point out the timing — not to question her bravery in coming forward with information but to underline how little Russia cares about the individual human lives of its athletes. Depriving them of the chance to compete clean demonstrates how little their country believes in them. Nor does Russia take care of its athletes; the system abandons them by forcing them to take drugs to win and then throwing them under the bus once they are of no further use. The message is clear: Winning on the world stage is everything, and individual lives are dispensable.
This position isn’t new. From the time the Soviet Union officially joined the Olympics after World War II (in 1952), the state took the games extremely seriously. Sports — like ballet or music or folk dancing — was a political weapon. Gabe Polsky’s fantastic 2015 documentary, “Red Army,” shows how young kids were taken to special schools and shuttled into a system that prepared the best of the best to win at the international level.
Winning brought better living conditions, opportunities and validation — not a Wheaties box, but cultural capital nonetheless. Yet losing also brought consequences. Polsky’s documentary details the team’s experience after losing at the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid, New York: living for months without their families, a brutal training regime and a cold KGB coach who did not have the best interests of his athletes at heart.
The McLaren report from Sochi showing that the FSB — the former KGB — was involved in doping also proves that the Russian state’s promotion of sports-as-propaganda at the expense of athletes’ health has not stopped. The real losers from the IOC’s failure to ban might be the Russian athletes themselves, because now their potential to win will motivate coaches and sports officials to continue to seek workarounds to sustain the doping program
But I’d like to caution that any holier-than-thou reaction to the IOC’s non-ban should give us pause. After all, it’s not only the Russians who dope. Other athletes might dope for different reasons and in different ways — perhaps not as part of a state-supported program, for example — but doping is there, in the Olympics and in professional sports. The very fact that there are so many anti-doping agencies only underscores how serious a problem it is. And we know it. Moreover, we know the health risks to athletes of high-pressure training and competition. And still we watch.
We should ask ourselves why, for example, we forgive swimming sensation Michael Phelps for drunken driving. Is it only because he went to rehab, met a model and had a baby — in other words, because he fulfills our narrative of redemption? What about our athletes — Olympian or otherwise — who struggle personally after athletic success, or who arrive at the finish line second or third or fourth? There is, it seems, a human cost to any and all of the miracles we crave by watching the Olympics.
Since NBC does not stream for free to those who do not pay a cable company, we all pay to watch athletes run faster, jump higher and stick impossible landings. We know the Olympic Games are a moneymaking venture, we know the dark sides behind the hype, and yet we watch and we cheer. If we want truly clean sports, we might have to pay the price by re-thinking our miracles.
