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Jewish World Review Oct. 5, 2000 / 6 Tishrei, 5761
Philip Terzian
No, what has made television coverage of the Olympics painful in recent years is the
process of Oprahfication. Instead of allowing viewers to watch the athletes compete, without
dramatic narration, we are treated to incessant profiles of participants, all of whom seem to
have overcome some disability, or family misfortune, or tragic roll of the dice which may only
be redeemed by the winning of a medal.
Olympic athletes are part of a national team, and used to say that they had triumphed (or
tried to do their best) for their country. Now, that sense has been largely supplanted by the
first person singular, from We to Me. The pole is not vaulted for the home team anymore, but
for the person doing the vaulting, in his/her struggle for redemption, revenge, recovery or
recompense. Nike is the flag these sportsmen salute.
What I am driving at, I suppose, is the decline of Olympic sportsmanship, especially
(perhaps exclusively) among American athletes. I know that famous sportsmen are seldom what
they seem -- Sam Snead is an old sharpie, and Babe Ruth was a slob -- but, in public at least,
athletes tended to perform to an ideal. Money has something to do with it, no doubt:
Multimillionaire pros have few incentives to behave themselves, and amateurs earn little beyond
admiratio. But something has happened in the world of sport when someone like John McEnroe
complains about bad manners.
And for Americans, at least, these latest Olympics provided more than a few embarrassments.
There was James Carter, the 400-meter hurdler from Baltimore whose mother was in Sydney because
her fellow workers paid for her airline ticket and hotel room. With 20 meters to go in his
semifinal event, Carter, who was well ahead of the field, slowed down, turned to his
competitors, and taunted them to hurry and try to catch up. Then there was Amy Van Dyken, the
Colorado swimmer, who has the habit of filling her mouth with water before a race and spitting
it into the lane of her principal rival: A psychological device, she explains.
In these instances, at least, the gods were not mocked. Both Carter and Van Dyken came in
fourth in their final events, just missing medals. (Indeed, the gracious Dutch swimmer Van
Dyken sought to intimidate, Inge de Bruijn, beat her handily.) But there was no comeuppance for
the winning American relay team -- Maurice Greene, Bernard Williams, Jon Drummond and Brian
Lewis -- whose preening, clowning, gyrations and exhibitionism earned them the loudest boos in
the stadium. And while Michael Johnson is a great runner, his habit of standing in front of any
camera and reciting his mantra -- "Only gold; no silver, no bronze" -- made more than a few of
his countrymen cringe.
To be sure, poor sportsmanship is scarcely confined to the Olympics. Professional football
now features spasmodic dance movements (called "hot-dogging") to celebrate touchdowns or harass
frustrated players. Baseball games are routinely interrupted for shouting matches with umpires;
tennis is replete with grunting sore winners. And with the invention of the video camera, we
get to witness parental fistfights at Little League games on a regular basis.
So what happened? My own theory is that the Oprah effect has somehow combined with the
legacy of Muhammad Ali, elbowing gallantry aside and ielding arrogance. Now that he is
afflicted with Parkinson's disease, it is considered bad form to speak of Ali in anything but
the most reverential terms; but what attracted the chattering class to him in the first place
is now largely the problem of sporting behavior. It was Ali who literally and figuratively
thumped his chest, racially taunted the gentlemanly Floyd Patterson, and scoffed at his
obligations as a citizen. "I am the greatest" began as a joke, but has since become a basic
presumption.
Of course, expectations are a problem in sport: We tend to invest all manner of virtues in
people who run faster or hit harder than others, but whose character has nothing to do with
their achievement. Still, in Sydney these past weeks, it was hard not detecting a national
pattern. Even Svetlana Khorkina, the alluring Russian gymnast whose pout was nearly as
impressive as her skill, conceded her place in the vault competition to an aspiring teammate.
Try to imagine Amy Van Dyken, or one of the American relay runners, performing such an act of
self-abnegation. You cannot, and that's the
10/02/00: It's a wonderful life?
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