Can't run, can't swim, can't jump. But we can't lose
by Ross Clark


THE ANTITHESIS of the Olympic spirit is symbolised by the plan of Adolf Hitler at Berlin in 1936 to demonstrate the prowess of the Aryan race; a scheme that went badly wrong when the black American athlete Jesse Owens won four gold medals. Such a blatant attempt to use the Games to show off the physical prowess of a particular people couldn’t happen today, of course. Not in the big, cuddly international community we have become.

Well actually it could, and in Athens it will. In three weeks’ time Britain’s Olympians will arrive back at Heathrow bathed in glory. Never mind the disappointing performances of some of our athletes in the preliminaries, it won’t prevent our country from claiming record numbers of medals. The French and Germans will also boast success. Yet the crowd at the hurriedly finished main Olympic stadium will not be hearing a lot of God Save the Queen, the Marseillaise or Deutschland über Alles. This is because most of the medals won by developed nations in Athens will be in secondary sports in secondary venues.

Developed nations win at the likes of cycling, canoeing and sailing because only they can compete. Many of the marginal sports require extremely expensive items of specialist equipment that are available only to competitors financed by the taxpayers of wealthy countries. Take cycling, one of Britain’s strongest events, at which we won 11 medals in 2000. In Athens our cyclists will be riding bicycles developed with £1.3 million of public money. How are Ugandan cyclists supposed to compete with us without resource to the latest carbon-fibre technology? The answer, of course, is that they are not.


BETWEEN Los Angeles in 1984 and Sydney in 2000, the number of Olympic events mushroomed from 221 to 300. Hardly any, however, were in disciplines that could be said to be pure tests of strength and endurance: most were in events that amount to a protectionist racket on the part of sportsmen from wealthy countries.

The results are there for all to see: four years ago, two American economists, Andrew Bernard, of the Tuck School of Business, and Meghan Busse, of the University of California, produced a paper forecasting the numbers of medals which would be won by each country in Sydney. In the case of America and France they were spot-on, while in the case of twelve other countries they were just one medal out. They had arrived at their prediction not through a study of competitors’ form, but through a simple formula based on GDP. In spite of this, the International Olympic Committee has no rules for limiting the amount of money a country can spend effectively buying its medals.

In the purer Olympic events, such as athletics and swimming, in which the whole world competes, the performance of First World athletes is sliding. In Barcelona in 1992, 12 out of Britain’s 48 medals were in athletics. In Atlanta in 1996 it was nine out of twenty-four medals and in Sydney 2000 it was just six out of fifty-five medals. It is a similar story with Australia, which won sixteen gold medals in Sydney but only one in athletics, and with France, which won thirteen golds in all, but none on the track or field. The real heroes of the 2000 Olympics were the Kenyan athletes, who won four golds. But in the Western media their achievements were lost among the accolades awarded to the likes of the blonde Australians who swept the world at beach volleyball, a sport which surely only Australia takes seriously. Hitler would have been a very happy spectator.

Over the next couple of weeks we will hear a great deal about how drugs are ruining the Olympics. But drugs play a small part in the perversion of the Olympic ideal. The real scandal is that of First World athletes who are winning their medals at minor, contrived events by snorting and injecting vast quantities of taxpayers’ money.

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I once made a mistake, but I was wrong about it.

Really interesting and very thought provoking. I have to agree on many counts.

It still does not excuse India from such a dismal performance. India isn't SUCH a poor country that we can't even win a single gold at the olympics. And now there's this doping disgrace...

I hope we churn out some atheletes along with engineers and doctors.

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