A Glorious Games

My column has been tardy of late for one reason: the Olympics.

The swimming and gymnastics were utterly consuming. But after the first week, the television became a vacuum that pulled me in and didn’t spit me out until I had passed out on the couch well past my bedtime.

Though I cheered my guts out for the U.S. of A., rooting against the Chinese became almost as intoxicating. As the stories poured in by the bucketful, it became glaringly obvious that a shroud of darkness clouded the Games. And I’m not even talking about Beijing’s smog.

The fortnight kicked off with the Chinese government disabling most cars in the capital to help alleviate the smog. It followed with the silencing of Free Tibet protesters. Outside of the muffled picketers and American President George Bush, no other human rights advocates spoke up. That is a tribute to China’s highly oppressive government.

One of the main ways to differentiate between the East and the West is the mindset of the people. The West expresses individualism, bringing differing people together to maximize a group’s potential. The East sees individuals as the building blocks of the larger organization, sacrificing personal endeavors to operate as one. This was clearly seen by the actors en mass during the Opening and Closing ceremonies to create such a masterpiece of grand illusion. Then the London performance for the games of 2012 came along with every actor dressed differently, having a different movement and different task. It combined the voice of a great recording artist with an opposing sound of hard rock by legendary guitarist Jimmy Page.

Japan uses this Eastern trait of its people to create an enormously successful economy from a relatively small population and land area. China uses the trait to will its subjects to serve the government, though labeling it “for the country.”

The International Olympic Committee has an age limit of 16 by the end of the Olympic year exactly for reasons China provided during the Games. It had a goal to capture all eight diving gold medals. It accomplished that by pulling kids out of regular education early in their lives and putting them in the sports the government believed they would excel in. Didn’t you wonder why the U.S. star is 30-year old Laura Wilkinson and the Chinese star is merely 15?

Of course the women’s gymnastics saga is well chronicled. At least two of the children on the gold medal-winning Chinese team are most likely underage. Whether or not that gets proven is another story. My bet is the truth would not come out due to the Black Hand that is the Chinese government. However, I say don’t strip the medals from the underage athletes. They did win them after all. It was their government that cheated, not the athletes themselves. They were told to train and perform, and so they did lest they be jailed.

One story NBC told was how revered the educated are in China. The “cool” kids are the ones that make good grades and go to school. Playground equipment consists of maybe a rusted basketball hoop. If a student shows a propensity for athletics, they are quickly pulled out of his/her normal schooling and put into a national training program. One such athlete was an expert women’s gymnastics vaulter that called her parents crying about wanting to come home. Her parents did not dissuade her. They denied her that option. And thus she became an Olympian. Heartwarming, huh?

You could see it on the faces of most of these Chinese athletes. The over-joyous exuberance winning the gold provided most athletes seemed to escape many of the 51 Chinese champions. The image of each Chinese diver taking his/her routine, expressionless bow to the crowd after each jump still burns in my retinas. The programmed smiles of the Chinese gymnasts starkly contrasted to that of Americans Shawn Johnson and Jonathan Horton’s happy-go-lucky attitudes.

I use gymnastics and diving as such prominent examples because A) they are primetime sports, and B) they embody the dominance for which China aimed. The government made no bones about it – it trained athletes in the sports that had the most events. This way one great athlete could capture two or three gold medals.

However, that’s exactly what I found so fabulous about the American athletes. They excelled at the team sports. Basketball, volleyball, relays, softball, baseball. NBC reported how much better Horton performed in a team environment while he competed individually. Michael Phelps and company showed more emotion in winning their relays than in any individual event. Despite the lackluster showing by the men and women 4x100m track teams, the U.S. still performed admirably overall in track.

As a side note, the U.S. track team has some soul-searching to do reminiscent of basketball two years ago and hockey six years ago. This year’s track team came out focused on themselves as individuals, and it showed in the interviews and the 4x100m team’s performances. They did not represent America as ambassadors well.

Regardless, the track athletes and the vast majority of the world’s Olympians competed because they chose to pour their heart and soul into training for this moment. They made commitments to themselves and loved their countries enough to burn with that desire to compete wearing their colors.

Not so much with the Chinese. Every medal stand where the Chinese national anthem played carried that sense of obligation -- that sense to serve the country that dammed up a river for rowing competitions while simultaneously depriving rice-paddy farmers water, thus starving entire villages containing its own subjects.

A glorious Games, indeed.