By: Paul S Marchand
The concatenation of Russia’s new, draconian anti-LGBT legislation and the impending winter Olympics in the Black Sea resort town of Sochi has managed to put the International Olympic Committee in a well-nigh untenable position, and has exposed the moral bankruptcy of the bureaucracy of so-called Olympic movement.
Faced with remonstrances from much of the civilized world, Russia has apparently seen fit to double down on its hateful legislation, with senior Russian officials going so far as to threaten Olympic athletes who do not knuckle under to Russia’s queer Nuremberg Laws. Now, to make matters worse, the IOC has essentially embraced a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy for the Sochi Games.
If the IOC thinks it can march queer athletes back into the closet of DADT, it may very well have another thing coming. If the Russian government is foolish enough to believe that its highly equivocal and ambiguous “assurances” to the IOC are worthy of the slightest degree of credence, it, too, may well have another thing coming; the world knows all too well how much faith can be put in the Kremlin’s assurances; all one need do is a little historical research, or perhaps ask the still-living King Michael v. Hohenzollern of Romania, how far Moscow can actually be trusted.
Of course, the IOC has a long history of truckling to repressive regimes. The same IOC that had no problem awarding the 1936 Games (both winter in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and summer in Berlin) to Nazi Germany compounded its mistake by awarding the 1940 summer Games to Tokyo. (Those Games were ultimately canceled following the outbreak of World War II.) Awarding the Games to Moscow in 1980 and to Beijing in 2008 only solidified the IOC’s unfortunate reputation for kissing up to dictatorships, as it has again done by awarding the Games to Sochi.
Already, we know that Russia’s new “Black Hundreds” are gearing up for new pogroms against Russia’s queerfolk as their ancestors once rampaged through the Jewish shtetls of the Pale of Settlement during the latter part of the 19th century. Will we see pictures of lesbians or gay men laid out on gurneys with their heads broken in the same way we saw pictures of the bodies of Jewish pogrom victims in the savage Kishinev Pogrom of 1903, laid out, with their lifeless eyes staring from shattered faces?
And if we do, what then will be the reaction of the civilized world?
For there comes a point at which we can have no more truck with barbarism, particularly not a glossy, Internet-enabled barbarism made all the worse for being covered with a veneer of modern, technological conveniences. We dare not fall into the temptation of urging our athletes to put their heads into the bear’s mouth by attempting to engage in some kind of naïve, “Jesse Owens” protest moment.
Forasmuch as we knew in 1936 that Hitler and Co. were intent upon using the Berlin Games as a highly sophisticated public relations and marketing device for the Third Reich, we know nothing of the kind with respect to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and his gang of ex-KGB thugs. The Nazis at least gave the appearance of being considerate of international opinion. The Russians, by contrast, driven by an historic xenophobia, tend to reject the opinion of the outside world, preferring instead to respond to remonstrances therefrom by proffering an extended medial digit and offering the metaphorical equivalent of “fuck you.”
Well, fuck them, too, and the bear they rode in on.
We dare not put our athletes at risk by encouraging them to engage in “Jesse Owens” protest activities (though in truth, the strongest form of protest Jesse Owens engaged in was defeating much vaunted Nazi athletes on the field). We can predict that the IOC will take a punitive stance toward any such activities, having before us for precedent the splenetic reaction of the IOC and racist Avery Brundage (who didn’t much like Jesse Owens, either) to John Carlos and Tommy Smith’s Black Power salute after medaling in the men’s 200m in México City in 1968.
Moreover, any athlete who would be foolish enough to defy Russia’s Maximum Leader would necessarily face the very real possibility of falling into the malign hands of the Russian police apparatus. We cannot assume that should an athlete fall into such hands the IOC would do anything better than what the Gospels record Pontius Pilate as having done; the IOC would offer a few tepid protests, wash its hands of the matter, and tamely acquiesce in such an athlete’s destruction. After all, if Josef Stalin could ask “how many divisions has the Pope?” V.V. Putin can certainly inquire into the number of divisions possessed by the IOC.
We should not demand that our queer athletes travel willingly to Golgotha, any more than we should participate in the Golgotha Games of Sochi, even to the extent of watching them on television or streaming them over the ‘Net. We may not be able to stop this IOC-orchestrated glorification of one of the world’s most repressive regimes, but we should be able to work toward ensuring that here in the United States, coverage of these Games gets a zero rating and a zero share.
Moreover, given the IOC’s poor history, maybe it is time that we reevaluated the utility of the so-called Olympic movement and the way in which the IOC awards the Games to various venues around the world. Perhaps we should discontinue the obscene whoredom of cities all over the globe prostituting themselves to get the Games. How far into impoverishment and debt, for example, is Brazil willing to take herself in order to host the Rio de Janeiro Games of 2016? Already, substantial segments of the Brazilian public have registered – in large demonstrations in the streets of Rio, of São Paulo, and as such other Brazilian cities as Brasilia and Belo Horizonte — their disapproval of committing to the construction of whited Olympic sepulchers resources that could have been applied to bettering the lot of Brazil’s poor. I daresay, I think the demonstrators may have a point. In an historically poor country, investing in social justice is always better than building another soccer stadium.
In the past, it has been suggested that the participating nations in the Olympic movement should agree among themselves to a single, permanent set of venues for the Games. Historical experience militates in favor of such a solution. The original Olympic Games were held every four years at Olympia, in the Peloponnesus, for almost 1200 years, from 776 B.C. to A.D. 394. Perhaps returning the summer Games to Olympia, financing the construction of infrastructure with contributions from Olympic-participant nations, would make sense. If nothing else, such capital projects would go a long way toward injecting needed cash into the struggling Greek economy, and, by preventing Greece from returning to its old currency, the Drachma, might even save the Euro and the Eurozone.
All in all, the bad and beastly behavior of the Russians should, if nothing else, challenge us to rethink some of the sacred cows that have grown up around the Olympic Games. If, as Abbie Hoffman pointed out “sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger,” now may be a good time to grill up and serve with fries and a Coke some of the more foolish notions that have engrafted themselves onto Baron de Coubertin’s original notion of a modern Olympics.
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Paul S Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California. Though not particularly athletic, he grits his teeth, goes off to the gym ever and anon, and runs himself ragged, all in the service of an ideal of waist management and better overall health. Say the word “cardio” to him and watch his head explode. The views contained herein are his own, and not necessarily those of any organization with which he may be associated, and are certainly not intended as legal advice, though one should always remember to turn off the treadmill before dismounting. Or else: Thump! Ow!
