Why the Olympics No Longer Matter . . . (To U.S.)

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/07/30/official-olympics-game-takes-gold-on-uk-charts/

There's something of a pun in the title to this post, and for that, I apologize.  It presented itself to me like a beggar on the street and I just couldn't refuse it.

Be that as it may, now that the 2012 Olympic games are over, I'm left with a feeling of ambivalence.  There's a giant, "eh," resounding through my mind, and I imagine myself shrugging every time I talk about the Olympics.

Certainly, not everyone feels the same way.  According to the Nielsens (those whacky guys that count who's watching what) this year's viewership surpassed the Beijing games by four million viewers, and this year's closing ceremonies were watched by thirty-one million people in the United States.

Viewership was probably aided by the fact that NBC poured expense and time into the events, adding 2,000 hours to coverage compared to 2008's Beijing Games.  According to the Nielsen's this was the largest viewership in 36 years, making it the first time since the Cold War that anyone in the United States seems to have cared about them.

Now, that's a gross generalization.  A lot of people invest countless hours into training for the Olympics every year; they pour their hearts and souls into the competition; and many more can't wait to see them compete.

But the Olympics have shifted meaning since the Soviet Union collapsed and the United States emerged as the world's dominant superpower.  Since then, consumerism has risen to unprecedented, and probably unforeseeable, levels.  Sports have come to symbolize something other than individual attainment, or the perfect embodiment of national zeal.

I remember being a child in the thrall of the Cold War.  I remember going into a library and finding a book that said that the USSR had something like three times as many ballistic missiles as the United States, or a million more men in the army, or some preposterous thing like that.  (I exaggerate or under-emphasize actual numbers due to the fact that I was 7 at the time and can't remember the exact numbers.)  I remember feeling outraged that they had beaten us at something.  Yes, I remember thinking in Manichean "us-them" terms.  Some of you may remember Rocky going to the Soviet Union to absorb a couple of Dolph Lundgren's 2,000 lb/square inch blows.  Or those pesky MiGs that just won't leave Maverick alone.  That's the zeitgeist. 

The United States, at that time, had invested a great deal of energy into beating the USSR in any and every possible field.  We can see that reflected in Olympic viewership and the subsequent fall when the Soviet Union dissolved.  We didn't have anyone to fight.  Now, who's left?  China?  Maybe, but the ardor is missing from that rivalry.

What we're seeing in the spike in viewership, aside from the 2,000-and-some-odd hours of additional coverage (which no doubt matters) is the resurgent need for America to be good at something.  We're not terribly good at empire-building (as evidenced from Iraq and Afghanistan), and we haven't quite got this post-industrial capitalist thing down, either.  We're a nation adrift, demanding to be reminded that we can be great at something.

But because we're a post-industrial nation, and long down the consumerist track, the Olympics no longer really matter.  It's interesting, and telling, that the primary American sport is not represented at the Olympics.  Football pulls in numbers of viewers comparable to the closing ceremonies every week.  The Super Bowl alone is a national holiday, and the players we have elevated to demi-god status amass levels of wealth so unseemly that it beggars both belief and credulity.  Nonetheless, American football is unrepresented in the Olympics.  Is it because only one country in the world could field a team?  Or is it because football represents something inherently American--something that defies the cosmopolitan goals of the Olympics?

Because this isn't a blog post about why American football should be included in the Olympics, but rather my own musings about why the Olympics no longer matter (or perhaps, might soon matter again), I'll restrict myself here.  But suffice it to say that there is something inherently American to our version of football that is repellant to the Olympic games, and that is our propensity to cheapen sport by turning it into another form of consumer good.

Professional athletes are themselves goods--turned into commodities, packaged, and finally sold to the public for our own entertainment.  No more so than college athletes whom we have deluded into thinking that at least they'll get an education out of the deal.  Highly paid, worshiped and adored, nevertheless, our professional sports suffer from the fact that they are goods to be bought, sold and traded.  The vocabulary itself reflects this reality as players are yearly traded from one team to another--they are the living manifestation of their own trading cards.

But that's a little metaphorical, and I'm trying to keep this on the ground.  The reason this all matters, though, is because Olympians, with a few exceptions, do not compete for our amusement.  Their struggles throughout the years are entirely personal.  So, with the gradual commodification of sports in the post-Cold War era, the meaning of the Olympics shifted.  Olympic athletes could not be commoditized and so became unimportant.

Now, as the blows to American self-esteem strengthen, or as American nationalism re-surges because of internal, economic adversity, once more we'll see the Olympics start to matter again.  In fact, I'd go so far as to opine that as we return to a worldview of "us-v.-them" (regardless of who they are) we'll once more see viewership of the Olympics on the rise.