After Beijing, can the OIC save the Olympics?
BEIJING — Before he got out of town, the great Canadian snowboarder Mark McMorris called the Beijing Games a version of “sports prison.” He was joking sort of but his — — vision wasn’t that far off.
The cordoned-off Olympic bubble that folds up when the closing ceremony ends Sunday has produced its usual collage of amazing athletes doing great things. This 17-day journey, however, has been witnessed through a sealedoff looking glass — a lens warped and sterilized by Beijing’s organizing committee with underwriting from the Chinese government.
The ultimate sponsor: the International Olympic Committee, which has been under fire for producing Games that, to many, have felt soulless while also being tainted by scandal and political posturing.
“I think that sometimes it doesn’t seem like their heart is in the right place,” the outspoken freestyle skier Gus Kenworthy said. “It feels like it’s a greed game. I mean, the Olympics are so incredible. But it’s a TV show.“
As the IOC pulls up stakes from Beijing, it has 29 months to hit the reset button and hope for a different, COVID-free and much better vibe when the Summer Games go to Paris.
The lingering question is whether, even in a more-welcoming, democratic locale, the Olympic overseers can repair their reputations to the point that people — most notably, the dwindling TV audience and the increasingly alienated throng of athletes — start to enjoy this enterprise again.
Some images they’ll have to work to forget:
■ Tennis player Peng Shuai and IOC President Thomas Bach hanging out together to watch freeskier Eileen Gu’s first gold medal.
■ The thousands of testers, cloaked head to toe in personal protective gear, shoving swabs down athletes’ throats day after day for their mandatory COVID19 screenings.
■ A sobbing Belgian skeleton racer, Kim Meylemans, going to social media to beg for release from quarantine.
■ And, of course, the Russian doping scandal, all perturbingly encapsulated by the image of 15-year-old figure skater Kamila Valieva crying after her disastrous long program while her coach asked: “Why did you stop fighting?”
“For all the wrong reasons,” said Syracuse pop culture professor Robert Thompson, Valieva’s performance last Thursday made for riveting television.
“Surprising, weird and hyper-dramatic,” he said. “Yet today, I searched the hallways in vain to find anyone who had seen it, or even heard tell of it. I’ve been paying close attention to the Olympics for 40 years, and never have I seen one surrounded by so much silence, so little buzz.”
Through last Tuesday, the Nielsen Company said prime-time viewership on NBC ( which pays the lion’s share of the bills for these Games ) and its streaming service, Peacock, was down 42 percent from a 2018 Games that didn’t do all that well, either.
The simplest explanation is to point toward the ever-increasing menu of viewing options and the time difference; this was the third straight Winter Games held in Asia.
That the IOC had to turn to authoritarian Russia, then China, for two of its last three Winter Olympics speaks to a larger problem that underscores how much less people care. Cities willing to foot the bill for the Games, then share the heat with the IOC over a years-long buildup, are harder to find these days.
With only one other choice for 2022 — Kazakhstan — the IOC decision to hand over one of its crown jewels to China came with compromises.
Beijing’s organizing committee, and, in conjunction, the Chinese government, took extreme measures to keep the COVID-19 virus, which originated inside its borders two years ago, from spreading. It also made subtle but persistent suggestions that speaking out about any issue that makes for bad headlines in China — human rights, Uyghurs, Taiwan, Hong Kong, pollution — were not welcome.