Keeping the flame alive

Millions of us will watch the Athens Olympics on TV, but we'll be torn between exhilaration and cynicism, writes Shane Hegarty…

Millions of us will watch the Athens Olympics on TV, but we'll be torn between exhilaration and cynicism, writes Shane Hegarty

It's March 1896 and 26-year-old Irishman John Boland is in Greece to watch the first modern Olympic Games. He meets a friend, the secretary of the organising committee. They play a little tennis. The Greek is impressed with his skills and insists he should play in the Olympic competition.

Boland declines, but is eventually persuaded. A few days later, in the shadow of the Temple of Jupiter in Athens, he arrives for his Olympic début. He has brought little gear, so takes to the court in a pair of leather, heeled shoes. He breezes through the preliminary rounds.

Three days later, the finals are played. He wins gold. Then he teams up with a German doubles partner. He wins gold again.

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Boland had arrived as a tourist and left as the first Irish Olympic champion. He later became a nationalist MP, and in his book A Day in Parliament this is what he has to say about his momentous achievement: "I was lucky enough to win the singles and doubles tennis titles in Greece." That's all. As if mentioning a rest stop on the way to somewhere important.

It's a wonderful Olympic story. Gifted amateur arrives filled with the spirit of international brotherhood and leaves victorious but not boastful.

The 1896 Olympics was that kind of games, however. When a Greek competitor broke his bicycle, his French opponent hopped off his and waited until it had been mended. Elsewhere, American Robert Garrett Jr picked up the discus for the first time a few days before the field event, liked the feel of it, competed, nearly killed some spectators with his first two throws and won it with his third - beating the Greeks, who had been lobbing the thing for millennia.

All of which must have delighted the watching Pierre de Coubertin, who had revived the Olympics from what he called "the springtime of history". He saw in them an ideal of amateurs competing in an atmosphere of true sportsmanship, with no flag-waving. He wanted the games to foster international peace, to bring mankind together as one. Except women. They weren't invited until 1900.

De Coubertin's heart is now buried near the ruins of Olympia, the token home of the International Olympic Committee. Next week the games return to their home, but the Olympic spirit that he envisioned, an ideal both vague and enticing, has flagged over the years. The cavalcade trails a long history of Nazi exploitation, superpower stand-offs, terrorism, cheating, corruption, commercialisation and drug scandals.

The millions who watch it on TV around the world will do so while torn between exhilaration and cynicism. We want to buy into the Olympic ideal, but are distracted by those trying to sell us so much else besides. Sponsorship, say the Athens 2004 organisers, was an integral part of the ancient games. The commercialism is needed "to remain faithful to this heritage". Ten major sponsors have paid $600 million to remain faithful to the heritage. It helps pay the bills, even if compatibility remains questionable. Train for the Olympics on a diet of McDonald's and Coca-Cola, for instance, and you'll collapse exhausted simply pulling on your running spikes.

"Let us export runners and fencers," suggested de Coubertin. "There is the free trade of the future, and on the day that it is introduced within the walls of old Europe, the cause of peace will have received a new and mighty stay." Runners are now exported, if not so many fencers. They have become high-value salesmen for giant corporations with brand symbols far more recognisable than national flags. When basketball's "Dream Team" arrived from America to pound the rest of the world at the Barcelona Olympics, the players sponsored by Nike draped themselves in the Stars and Stripes, not out of patriotic pride but to cover the Reebok symbols on their shirts.

In his book Olympics in Athens 1896, Michael Llewellyn Smith suggests that perhaps it is time for the Olympics to be "celebrated as a triumph of modernity, capitalism, commerce, sporting prowess and celebrity culture". He's not alone in the revisionist sentiment. Dr Orin Starn, a teacher of sports anthropology at Duke University in North Carolina, recently pointed out that the games have always been rooted in their time, not in some ageless human spirit immune to fraternal infighting. "The myth is that the Olympics are a timeless idea going back to ancient Greece and they represent a pure, unadulterated expression of the human spirit. In fact, the Olympics have always reflected the culture and the times." Hence Cold War boycotts and acts of terrorism, he said.

De Coubertin's dream of a world united without flags was naïve, Starn added. "The very structure of the Olympics is all about reinforcing the idea of each nation as a separate entity. The Olympics have always been a theatre of nationalism. Every athlete drapes himself or herself in the flag. But there is also a tension between a celebration of the human spirit and the idea of nations creating glory by winning a bunch of medals." Even straightforward humanity is threatened as athletes use drugs to turn themselves into what he calls "a kind of cyborg".

Yet the Olympic rings remain a potent symbol; a standard everyone understands, regardless of the sport. People admire you if you compete at a World Championships, but they envy you if you go to the Olympics.

Eamonn Coghlan, a three-time Olympian, says that for 20 years he's been introduced to people with the question, "Have you heard of Eamonn Coghlan?" Sometimes, they haven't. He won the World Championships, they are told. Oh, really? Did you ever run in the Olympics, they ask? "And I'll say, yes. I came fourth twice. And they say, hard luck. If I was to say that I won the Olympics, it would be different. There'd be immediate acceptance, though the difference might have been only a few hundredths of a second."

To him, however, commerce and cheats have crushed the Olympic spirit. "The whole idea of the Olympic spirit was to get participation in sport, to learn through sport as well as to run the longest, jump the farthest and sprint the fastest. It was always commercialised, but with the big companies and media and TV exposure its mission statement has somewhat been lost." His sport has become an elitist event, he says, rather than one for those who deserve to compete. The qualifying standards have been set through drugs, and he is angry that Irish athletes who have worked cleanly and hard through their careers, but only gained the "B" standard, have been excluded by the Olympic Council of Ireland. There is no Olympic ideal in that.

Even the public loses the spirit if its athlete loses the race. "You have athletes who win national titles and they get a slap on the back. If they go to the Olympics, they might finish second last in their heat but perform to their best, yet people at home will say they're crap and they shouldn't be there. They're missing the point. Are the Olympics about only 16 days of glory or are they about keeping that going all the time?" It's down to the athletes, Coghlan says.

"The Olympic spirit is a personal thing, to be honest. When you get there to compete it is there. The hairs stand up on the back of your neck. For competitors their one focus is still the Olympics and they will pursue that. They won't allow any negative publicity to get in the way. It touches an emotion more than any other event, because it's one chance on one day, four years apart." It is the athletes, after all, who ensure that the torch stays lit, the stadiums filled, the television rights bought and the tills ringing.

In Cyprus this week, the Irish team were gathering for their pre-Olympic training. Amateur swimmer Emma Robinson is preparing for her second Olympics in a sport familiar with scandal. "When I went to Sydney I was innocent, in a bit of a bubble," she says. "One of the runners told me a few home truths about some of the athletes. It was so disappointing. I passed it on to my dad, who loves watching the Olympics, and he didn't want to believe it. When you're competing, you try not to focus on that. You only have the swimmer on either side of you and you take them at face value and take confidence from your own performance." Competing, she says, can be "a bit of an anti-climax" when four years of work is over in a minute. The spirit, she says, is there. In the Olympic village, among the teams, in the mixing of competitors from many sports.

Professional cyclist Ciaran Power is also in Cyprus preparing for his second Olympics. "I'm so focused on my event that I'm really only thinking about myself and making sure that I have the Olympic spirit, that I've done everything I can to perform at my best. You might call that the Olympic spirit. I imagine it's the same for the other athletes. It happens only every four years and there are not many who will ever compete in more than one or two. And it's a small team - 48 people out of any population is not a lot. If that can't lift your spirit, nothing can."

Somebody should tell Russian tennis player Marat Safin. He said earlier this year that he is reluctantly playing in the Olympics because he has been asked to represent his country. "I have to do it but it's not my goal in life to win the Olympic Games." It's not only him, he said. Marc Rosset of Switzerland was "not really proud" of the Olympic gold medal he won in 1992 and fellow Russian Yevgeny Kafelnikov "is probably the same" about his success four years ago. "You don't get this special feeling," he said.

In the professional era, the challenge of amateurism may be too much for some. "The money issue is interesting, because it can affect performance or motivation," says the Irish Olympic team psychologist Niamh Fitzpatrick, speaking from Cyprus. "The greatest source of motivation is an internal need to succeed and money can knock it off a bit. The Olympics are special, though.

"They're different. It is, as they say, the greatest show on earth. There is a sense that they have to be their absolute best for this event and money doesn't come into it. It becomes about what's inside an athlete. It becomes a matter of pride."

She quotes Theodore Roosevelt to the Irish Olympians: "It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."

Fitzpatrick points out that even the amateurs train at a professional level for the Olympics. The public, she says, too often misunderstands their achievements, seeing the Olympics in gold, silver and bronze hues rather than the individual goals attained by athletes, competing for themselves and their country.

"For me, the Olympic spirit is about getting out there, making mistakes, falling down, but getting up again. It's about not standing outside never having had a go. It's about being prepared for sweat and blood and pain. This idea of 'just doing your best' is too banal. Join Ciaran Power as he cycles for six hours, or the rowers as they get welts on their hands. Watch what they do in their daily lives; the effort and sacrifices they have to make for their talent. They have to want more than the benign idea of 'doing their best'. They want to exceed their best."

Which is why the Olympics are still the games of Jesse Owens, Mary Peters, Fanny Blankers-Coen, Emile Zatopek, Dawn Fraser and Steve Redgrave. It is why sentiment will always creep through the cracks in the commercialism, professionalism, scandals and international incidents. Why we cling on to the deeds of Jamaican bobsleigh teams in the Winter Olympics or of Eric "the Eel" Moussambani, the swimmer from Equatorial Guinea, splashing and spluttering his way across the Sydney pool.

It is why this month the Olympic Games will briefly belong to Afghanistan's Robina Muqimyar. The 18-year-old learned to run, she says, while being chased by Taliban officials for not covering herself with a burqa. She began training only a year ago and her best time of 15.06 seconds for the 100m will mean only a single, slow run. But the press will love her story. They will laud her from Bangladesh to Belgium. The world will be warmed by her efforts, comforted by her presence. It'll be saccharine and clichéd.

But for a few seconds at least we will again believe that there are some spirits that can never be broken.