By LexBlog Admin on July 11, 2008 Posted in Dallas Business Journal
The Beijing Olympics begin Aug. 8 and, like its Olympiad predecessors, will be the subject of concentrated international attention and round-the-clock television coverage for 18 consecutive days.
So what exactly is it that draws the world’s focus to mass quantities of athletic competition every four years?
Talmage Boston and David Maraniss
Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Maraniss answers the question this way in his new book “Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World” (Simon & Schuster 2008): “The singular essence of the Olympic Games is that the world takes the same stage at the same time, performing a passion play of nations, races, ideologies, talents, styles, and aspirations that no other venue, not even the United Nations, can match.”
The upcoming passion play of August 2008 in China should have many differences and similarities compared to its counterpart from the summer of 1960. Like all great nonfiction writers, Maraniss demonstrates that history merits our pleasure-reading time because of its capacity to confirm the paradox that over time, things change and they stay the same.
The specifics as to the most important changes in the Olympic Games over the last 48 years:
- Racial injustice around the world has diminished, as apartheid and Jim Crow laws have evaporated, allowing open competition for all races and extinguishing the dichotomy of integrated athletic teams who live in segregated societies;
- International gender injustice has diminished, such that the number of women’s events now essentially equals the men’s events, with no glass ceiling limitation as to what the female athlete can compete in with her Olympic sisters in sports;
- Technology has significantly enhanced the Olympics, from photo finishes with instant replays to satellite-delivered live coverage in high-definition, and thus we will see more and see better competition whose times and results will be measured with greater accuracy; and
- The greatest athletes in the world, not just the greatest amateur athletes, will be competing, as the days are gone when double standards of eligibility created international tension in the context of some countries having strict adherence and others totally disregarding the rules prohibiting compensation to athletes.
Yes, the Olympics have changed substantially since 1960, but they have also stayed the same, as Maraniss points out that, then and now:
- Some athletes will attempt to enhance their performance through the discrete use of prohibited drugs;
- Some countries will attempt to link their athletes’ most outstanding performances to their perceived superior ideology;
- The athletes themselves will care more about their competitions and less about political differences with their opponents, such that when races end, Arabs embrace Israelis, capitalists bond with communists, and rhetoric counts for little; and
- The most successful of the elite Olympians will become bona fide legendary figures. In 1960, sprinter Wilma Rudolph, boxer Cassius Clay (who later changed his name to Muhammad Ali), decathlon champion Rafer Johnson, and barefooted marathon runner Abebe Bikila all won gold medals in their events and left their permanent marks in the annals of sport, and a handful of competitors will surely do the same next month in China.
For those seeking to expand their level of Olympic consciousness in preparation for the games in Beijing, David Maraniss will be in Dallas at the Fairmont Hotel for a luncheon sponsored by the World Affairs Council of Dallas/Fort Worth on July 21 (go to www.dfwworld.org for more details and to purchase a ticket), to talk about “Rome 1960,” when for 18 days, sports, the media and international politics at the height of the Cold War all came together in a perfect storm.TweetLikeEmailLinkedInGoogle PlusTags: olympics