You are currently browsing the daily archive for April 6th, 2008.
Thousands of protesters waving Tibetan flags and shouting “Shame on China” disrupted the Olympic torch relay through London on Sunday, billed as a journey of harmony and peace.
Chinese officials in blue tracksuits and scores of British police officers encircled the celebrities and athletes parading the flame, but determined demonstrators repeatedly broke through their security cordon…
…One man grabbed the torch before police wrestled him to the ground. Two others tried to douse the flame with a fire extinguisher. Police arrested some 35 people…
But who is really responsible for this? Pre-protests, the journalistically eagle-eyed Simon Jenkins offered this thoughtful, opening salvo in The Sunday Times:
Today’s London publicity stunt for the Chinese regime should be ignored by the public and any reputable athlete or politician, unless to register a fierce protest. The four-month “journey of harmony” of the Olympic torch (or many cloned torches) through 21 nations is an exercise in political laundering. It is appalling that the prime minister is to “greet” his torch in Downing Street.
This tour has nothing to do with sport. It has been staged by the Chinese government, not the International Olympic Committee, with “celebrity runners” in each country approved by the commercial sponsors, Coca-Cola, Lenovo and Samsung. In Britain those conned into joining include Tim Henman, Sir Trevor McDonald, Vanessa-Mae, the Sugababes, Ken Livingstone and Gordon Brown. It shows how craven Britain has become to its membership of the so-called Olympic family and its Chinese parents…
The idea of carrying a lit torch from the Temple of Hera in Greece was invented by Hitler in 1936 to suggest a link between the German people and fellow Aryans in southern Europe…
So it is down to some celebrities, athletes, western politicians, business, and the Chinese communists themselves (whom only someone born yesterday wouldn’t have imagined wanted to try to create better PR, right?), and even Hitler (yes, and why not him, too?). Initially, they all get Mr Jenkins’s studied kicking.
Of course, kicking the latter is never a bad thing; but in this case it is too easy. And Mr Jenkins’s potshot at the Chinese communists is naturally also reasonable. But his overall swipe there manages pointedly to leave out the main culprits.
At last, mid-piece, he finally — one wondered if he ever would? — gets around to laying the blame squarely where it really belongs:
…a self-perpetuating mafia, the IOC, has relentlessly hyped the Games as festivals of national prestige to push their cost way beyond that of any other world championship and beyond the hopes of any poor city or nation…
…The IOC knows that only by investing the Games in flatulent pretension can it hope for rich governments to keep it in the style to which it has become accustomed. Nothing but dictatorship could have drained Beijing of the $30 billion that its Games are costing. After Britain’s experience of IOC lifestyle requirements - such as “Zil lanes” in Mile End Road for its personal limousines - it may have to rely on other dictatorships in future…
That’s right: it’s ultimately the fault of the IOC that all athletes, celebrities, western politicians, business, and we the sports-enjoying public, have been put in this incredibly awkward moral position. The IOC awarded these games to Beijing, when it should NEVER have done so in the first place.
Bear in mind, too, that Mr Jenkins is unsurprisingly full of sneering contempt for the “pretension … embodied in the torch“, and even for the Games themselves, seemingly regardless of host. How to scale any of it back to a level that would satisfy his uncluttered personal simplicity is unclear, given that any spectacle that includes flags, crowds and “grandeur” seems pretty much bound also to display some measure of pretense. And, remember, non-Olympics, Hitler did those, too.
So regardless of how this one came about, and like it or not, the torch procession has actually evolved into a pretty tame and generally understated “spectacle” (insofar as spectacles nowadays go) sponsored in the early 2000s by Olympic hosts. The primarily problem with this one is that a dictatorship is sponsoring it, while it is simultaneously crushing a local uprising. (If Finland were where the host city were located, one suspects Mr Jenkins would not care about the relay nearly as much.) That is where the IOC has stuck it to all of us, and should be made to answer for doing so.
Indeed, who has the inside track at the IOC on the next summer games due to be awarded? Probably Harare, Zimbabwe.
The Telegraph (via my wife):
New York children will be encouraged to fling off their baseball gloves and pick up a cricket ball after education chiefs established a league in the city’s schools.
Cricket may be battling against declining interest in English and Caribbean schools, but it is becoming increasingly popular in a city more famous for the Yankees and Dodgers baseball teams…
The poor Mets. Founded and in the city since 1961 (the year of the birth of a current presidential aspirant), yet the Dodgers, gone since 1958, still survive.
…The Wall Street Journal said that while Americans had “long viewed cricket as a frivolously complicated, inferior sport”, US businessmen would be wise to learn about it so they can converse with fans in international business meetings…
That is not unimportant. For example, what do you say when colleagues from, especially, the Indian subcontinent (where it is THE GAME) are rattling on about Team B “is 201-7, in the second innings, chasing 488″? “Wow!”, you answer, “Team B’s had it.” (Because there are only 2 innings; there are ten outs; they are over 280 runs behind and have only 3 outs left; and the lower order in cricket, like in baseball, is NOT strong.)
Overall, it is a great game, and — seriously — is really fundamentally no more complicated than baseball:
Also, my fellow countrymen might be pleased to know, it is perhaps even more happily prone to scandal than is baseball.
Recent Comments