The Olympic
Games 2000
Shown on BBC TelevisionHaving bought a new widescreen set
last summer, Mrs Gabb and I found ourselves watching more than usual
on the television. In particular, we sat up late to watch the Olympic
Games now being held in Sydney. As it is the sport we both enjoy
doing, we mostly watched the swimming. These were my impressions at
the time:I cannot say I am impressed. I can appreciate how fast the
swimmers move though the water. But what strikes me most about them
is their great ugliness. Many of them have taken to wearing rubber
suits, and these, by presenting an undifferentiated surface to the
viewer, draw attention to the shape of their bodies. The women have
unattractively large thighs and very small breasts, but otherwise are
fairly womanly. The men, however, look barely human. They have
enormously wide shoulders and even more enormous feet. One of the
swimmers - an Australian youth whose name escapes me - has size 17
feet. He looks like a circus clown with them, but seems happy enough,
since they help him to swim faster than all the other
competitors.This is what the "Olympic Ideal" has come to
mean - not the cultivation of athletic grace, but the mere breaking
of records. By the 1960s, the records had been set as high as any
normal athlete could manage, and so those who wanted to continue
breaking them had to take drugs to enhance their performance. I think
it was the Soviets who really began this, in their efforts to prove
that socialism created a faster, stronger human being; and by the
1970s, their team trainers had become little better than pharmacists
with a talent for knowing where to hide needle scars from the drug
inspectors. But, once started, the drug race had to be taken up by
anyone else who wanted not to be beaten off the field.Today, this
race is growing too risky to maintain. Drugs continue to be taken,
but sophisticated testing and routine invasions of personal dignity
are disqualifying too many athletes. And so the search is on for
natural freaks - those for whom we might normally feel pity, but
whose deformity can with training be turned to advantage in the
competition for medals.This is, however, likely to be only a
transitory resort. As very few people are born with size 17 feet, or
legs four foot long, or whatever, I am sure that genetic engineering
will soon be called in to supplement the work of nature. The champion
swimmers of 2048 will probably be seven foot tall, have pointed
heads, vestigial sexual organs - or, in the case of women, no breasts
- double jointed knees, and webbed flippers instead of feet. They
will need to be carried to and from the pool, and may not live much
beyond the age of thirty. I have no doubt their trainers will swear
themselves blind that these variations from the norm are entirely
fortuitous, nor any doubt that the television commentators from the
countries where they were manufactured will shout themselves ecstatic
whenever one of them swims half a mile in less than thirty seconds.In
my younger days, I always wanted to look like a swimmer. Though I
occasionally tried for the ideal, I never achieved it, and am now a
person of considerable size. Looking at those freakish young men on
television the other evening, and thinking forward to the likely
horrors of the coming century, I am almost reconciled to being
fat.The Greeks, of course, managed their Olympic Games with more
sense. The ancient cycle of Olympiads ran from 776 BC - at least,
that is when the earliest records of victors begin - to 393 AD, when
Theodosius I suppressed all pagan rites within the Roman Empire.
During this time, the Games were held for five or six days every
fourth July at Olympia in central Greece. As might be expected, the
Greeks had none of the chivalrous spirit that became fashionable in
the English athletics of the Victorian age; and the thousand years of
their Olympic Games are swelled with scandal. According to Pausanius,
who wrote about the sites of mainland Greece in the second century,
the first known bribe was given at the Games of 384 BC by Eupalus of
Thessaly, and the last I know of was given by Sarapammon of
Arsinoites at the Games of 127 AD. Between these dates, the custom
emerged of forcing athletes caught cheating to dedicate a statue to
Zeus; and Pausanius describes many of these. Otherwise, there was
cowardice: Sarapion, an Alexandrian wrestler, took fright and ran
away from his opponent at the Games of 27 AD. There was
cross-dressing, as when one Callipateira dressed as a trainer to get
a closer watch as her son competed in the Games. Her sex was
discovered by accident, and though she was not punished, the judges
ordered that the trainers should go about in future as naked as the
athletes. And there was sordid or bizarre behaviour among the
non-competitors, as when the philosopher Peregrinus burned himself to
death at the Games of 167 AD.Even so, the Greeks always acted in the
best possible taste. Their Olympic stadium was a work of the most
beautiful architecture, They set up statues of their Olympic
champions that are among the greatest works of art ever created, and
commissioned odes to them by poets such as Pindar and Bacchylides and
Simonides. Above all, they never thought to measure the performance
of their champions.Though they lacked the obsession with measurement
of time and space that lies at the heart of our civilisation, the
Greeks did appreciate the value of accurate measurement.
Eratosthenes, for example, used simple geometry to measure the
circumference of the Earth - he noted that at noon on a certain day,
the sun shone directly overhead at Syene, but cast a shadow in
Alexandria; and measuring the angle of the shadow, projected two
lines downward to a deduced angle at the centre of the Earth, thereby
finding what fraction of the whole circle was the arc that lay
between the two cities. This achievement, for all its abstract
genius, rested on his ability to measure the 500 mile distance
between Alexandria and Syene. Again, Archimedes was able to calculate
the fineness of gold in a crown by comparing its weight with the
volume of water it displaced. The Greeks had the tools to measure
distance and clocks to measure time as accurately as any of us still
need for our every day purposes; and they had the scientific
curiosity to use these. But they never, so far as I know, used them
to measure sporting achievement.I do not know who was the first
non-mythical Olympic champion recorded. But the last one was an
Armenian called Varastad. They all had their olive crowns and - so
far as the arts of their times allowed - their odes and statues. We
can still admire the Disc Thrower sculpted by Myron and Eniochos the
Charioteer from Delphi, and even base gloomy thoughts on the possible
life and times of Varastad. But we have no idea how fast they were.
The achievements of one Olympiad were celebrated - but, being
unmeasured, could not be compared with the achievements of any other.
The judges at the ancient Games would probably have been shocked at
the thought of fawning on some deformed creature because he had
shaved nine 32nds of a second off a speed record set six months
earlier and that would be broken three weeks later by seven 64ths of
a second. The olive crown went to the best of those competing at the
time, and that victory was the only one that mattered. The
competitors were expected to be graceful and well-proportioned. That
is, they were expected to look like the people I used to want to look
like myself - and, to be honest, still do hopelessly want to. No one
with size 17 feet would have been suffered to enter the ancient
Games, and most of the athletes who now win medals for running would
have been pelted off the racetrack for their ugliness.I have read
much nonsense about the ancient Games - usually written by people
whose words were about sweetness and light but whose thoughts were
wholly and obviously about boys exercising naked in the sunlight. The
Greeks were a strange people, and if the games they watched never
matched the horror of what the Romans enjoyed, their Olympics were
frequently brutal and corrupt. But they did have the humanity never
to inflict on their athletes what we do on ours.So here is another
article that has not discussed Tony Blair or the Conservative Party
or the New World Order. But, as ever, it does end with a lament on
the degeneracy of the times in which we live. O saeclum insapiens
et infacetum!