Pre-Games chaos putting a damper on Olympics
Usual worries about the Olympics in hyper-drive this time around
The Summer Olympics begin two weeks from Friday. Can you feel the excitement? The hope is that the Games competition will save the day, as usual, but the hurdles to clear before consumers can watch with any sense of belief or trust are hurdles that won’t be on the Olympic Stadium track.
Granted, the run-up to the opening ceremony is always charged with an air of apprehension and concern. The readiness of venues and security, the fairness of ticket distribution, environmental impacts, even troubling weather forecasts — these are the daily bread of preOlympic stories.
The Rio Olympics, though, take the cake. Gather all the previous pre-Games negativity and pump it up with steroids and you have the state of affairs in the final 14 days before the Rio Games.
If the issues were listed alongside tiny boxes, we could check them all: political unrest, crime, poverty, pollution, fear over the Zika virus despite the seasonal shift to winter in Brazil, the Russian doping scandal which continues to cast a dark cloud.
In what can only be described as disheartening to fans of the Games, the daily sports dispatches are even now carrying new names of athletes dropping out of the competition. Most of these are professionals — PGA Tour golfers and tennis players who don’t really need Olympic victories to enhance their prestige or their bank accounts. The Olympics are an ill-timed inconvenience to their busy, structured lives on Tour.
Some had legitimate health concerns. Most seemed to be using the mosquito-borne Zika issue as an excuse. Ireland’s Rory McIlroy came closest to the truth when he said he wouldn’t even be watching the Olympic golf tournament, let alone taking part in it. He would rather see, he said, “track and field, swimming, diving — you know, ones that matter.”
If McIlroy can do without the Games, the reverse is also true.
As much fun as it’s been to watch Sidney Crosby score the “golden goal” for Canada at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics and to witness the spectacle of USA basketball dream teams, the Games lost something when highly-paid professionals were allowed to enter the five-ringed circus en masse, stealing attention away from athletes who only know the spotlight every four years.
From the moment Magic Johnson and Larry Bird set foot in their luxury hotel at the Barcelona Olympics of 1992, the Games were forever changed.
The IOC got what it deserved when it reintroduced golf at the Olympics out of lust for having the likes of Tiger Woods and other multimillionaire golfers compete, only to have many of the biggest names withdraw.
Woods, of course, is out with back problems.
My favourite might-go, might-not waffling comes from Canadian tennis player Eugenie Bouchard, who said she will probably decide next week about participating, “because I’m a lastminute person.”
Hey, no rush, Eugenie. The IOC hasn’t even decided yet if the Russian team will be banned from competing in Rio over its unrepentant culture of systemic doping.
Misguided or not, Bouchard seems genuinely concerned about her health and that of her offspring because of the Zika virus and the remote possibility of having a child born with microcephaly.
“I just don’t know if the health of my future babies is worth (risking) it, so that’s what I’m trying to decide,” Bouchard told reporters this week.
Most Canadian athletes feel reassured by the COC and the World Health Organization. Longtime Canadian Olympic paddler Adam van Koeverden, reacting to yet another athlete withdrawal, recently tweeted that the “most recent stats from WHO on chances of contracting Zika at RIO2016 are between 1-3/100,000. Just saying.”
All this chaos puts a damper on the Olympics for those who care most about being there.
For their sake, I hope there can soon be clarity on the issue of the Russian team in Rio (a decision is expected Sunday), and that competitors can feel confident in their personal health and safety while they focus on their events.
It’s for athletes like Melissa Bishop, the 800-metre runner from Eganville, that you want the Games to find their footing.
Postmedia’s Vicki Hall recounted watching Bishop obliterate the field at the Canadian Olympic trials in Edmonton, only to shriek afterward: “I’m going to Rio!”
An expression of pure joy from an amateur athlete who grew up in a small town with an Olympic dream, now reaching her second Olympics in an event that runs true to the history of the Games’ modern roots in Greece in 1896.
Bishop is running because she wants and deserves to be there.
Where others have doubts and fears, she has resolve. She runs for herself, for her supportive family, for her community in the Ottawa Valley and at the University of Windsor. She runs, especially, for her coach, Dennis Fairall, who is ill with progressive supranuclear palsy, a degenerative brain disorder for which there is no cure. Fairall will be with Bishop in Brazil.
This is the kind of story you root for when the noise finally subsides and the Games begin.