Watered down in the chase of youth
RIO DE JANEIRO— Faster, higher, stronger — dumber.
What next? Walking as an Olympic sport. Oh, pardon, funny walk is already on the menu. So perhaps walking whilst texting — on an obstacle course featuring oncoming automobiles, fire hydrants and little old ladies knocked sideways.
Yeah, that’ll get young people all excited about the Games. Because hell, the world revolves around millennials anyways — just ask ’em — so why shouldn’t the biggest entertainment spectacle on Earth? And the Olympics athletes’ oath should be rapped too.
Ballroom dancing became a full member of the General Association of International Sports in 1992, which makes it one cha-cha-cha step removed from the Games, where plenty of fans argue it should be, and has in fact been under discussion though thus far wiser minds have prevailed.
There appears to be a dearth of those around the International Olympic Committee. But the Lords of the Rings have leapt right of sanity radar with the announcement, at its 129th session — it concluded Thursday — of four new sports added to the roster and one resurrected.
Baseball/softball certainly deserves to be let back in the Olympics loop, separately featured in previous Games and definitively sports. Karate probably should join judo — the only other martial arts event contested at the Games — and will certainly please Japan, where the discipline was invented and where it will debut at the Tokyo Olympics four years yon.
But surfing? Yo, daddio-Os and dudes. It’s a lifestyle, not a sport. Nobody’s explained yet how surfing will be staged, logistically. Not all host-yearning cities have waves worth riding. Perhaps the world’s biggest wave pool will have to be constructed. Out of the five bid cities remaining for 2024 — Rome, Paris, Budapest, Hamburg and L.A. — only La-La-Land boasts easy access to an ocean shoreline. And the weather has to co-operate. But if resort city Sochi can be considered an appropriate Winter Games locale, than I suppose anything is possible.
Nor has anyone convinced if, why, surfers want genuinely to be part of this extravaganza. They’re outliers, antiestablishment types. Imposing the rictus of rules strikes me as cruel.
And they haven’t exactly been jumping up and down on their boards demanding inclusion. (Though something called surflifesaving — “a multi-faceted movement that comprises key aspects of voluntary lifeguard services and surfing” — was an Olympic demonstration sport in 1900 and is apparently quite popular still in Australia. But Aussies are weird. And who will surf-lifesaving be performed upon at the Games, so that it can be judged? Will volunteers be recruited to nearly drown?)
Then there’s skateboarding, good grief. What your kamikaze kid does on the sidewalk.
Sport climbing. Another activity for the pointlessly adventurous. Welcome to it, certainly, but as a spectator attraction? I suppose if people will watch dressage — the first Games sport I ever covered — then there will be aficionados out there willing to plunk down their ticket-money to watch while participants laboriously haul arse up a rock face. It doesn’t even have a world championship to call its own.
Ah, but it’s all about enticing youth, although it seems to me there are already more than enough young men and women thrilling to the allure of the Games, in the 28 existing disciplines.
“There is the youth aspect and the trend towards the urbanization of sports,” IOC president Thomas Bach told a news conference yesterday at the conclusion of the Lords’ 129th session. “The world has changed. Youth has so many options for their leisure time. We can’t wait for young people to come to our sports. Sports have to go where they are.” Bollocks. This is the IOC wildly over-reach- ing. As if the Games weren’t already bloated and lumbering enough. The five new sports will add 470 athletes in 18 appended events for Tokyo. Far too packed a program.
Unless the IOC decides to ditch some of the existing sports. But they’re obsessed with expansion. And they’ve been junking up the game with pseudo-sports for the last few decades. (Canada has actually been quite good at the parvenus, until the rest of the world catches up.)
Come the day, maybe an Olympics should be held for all the non-athletes on the planet instead, with athlete such a loose term. Slower, lower, weaker. I’d meet the qualification standards.