All politics is local, as the late Boston politician Tip O'Neill used to say, and all Olympics are political. No one knows this better than Juan Antonio Samaranch, elected president of the International Olympic Committee just before the 1980 Moscow Games and due to step down at next year's IOC congress, also in Moscow, after 21 years. And no games were more political than his first, the 1980 Moscow Olympics.
More than 60 countries, led by the United States, but not including Ireland, boycotted the games in the Russian capital, to protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.
Ironically, the granting of the Olympics to Moscow played an indirect role in the invasion: KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov established the Russian Alfa counter-terrorism unit with Olympic security in mind, but ended up using it first as an invasion strike force in Afghanistan. Thus, the 1980 Olympics became a Cold War battleground between East and West. Even without Afghanistan, this was always going to be an occasion for global propaganda. It was a golden opportunity to underscore the achievements of a great athletic and political superpower.
To present an image of a perfect socialist society, the city was cleared of blackmarketeers, dissidents, the homeless and prostitutes for the period of the Games.
The crackdown is commemorated in a work by the Russian playwright, Alexander Galin, which was staged in Dublin's Gaiety Theatre in October 1998, with the action taking place in a Moscow mental hospital where a group of prostitutes are confined as the Olympic Torch is carried through the streets. The city was also partly depopulated to accommodate the foreign guests, and most schoolchildren were shipped off to the countryside, and model citizens invited in from the provinces. On the plus side, longoverdue infrastructure projects were launched, including the building of Sheremetyevo-2, Russia's first air terminal built to international standards.
The Russians went to great lengths to ensure perfection. For the two weeks of the Games, the normally inconstant Russian weather was perfect. This, it was said, resulted from massive seeding of approaching clouds so that they dumped all their moisture somewhere over the unfortunate inhabitants of Ukraine.
The staff at the Olympic stadium also used the weather to their advantage, opening massive doors at strategic moments so that the Russian long-jumper would get a tail wind. The elaborate security arrangements in Moscow almost broke down when the ballad singer Vladimir Vysotsky died on July 28th, right in the middle of the two-week event. Vysotsky's irreverent, satirical lyrics sung in a gravelly voice expressed sympathy for the daily suffering of Russians, and his underground tapes were widely pirated.
A huge, almost-rebellious crowd gathered in Taganskaya Square to mourn his passing, and were quickly dispersed by mounted police. It was a close-run thing for the image of a Soviet paradise.
Despite the boycott, dozens of sporting records fell and there were memorable performances by Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci, Cuban boxer Teofilo Stevenson and Soviet swimmer Vladimir Salnikov.
The Sydney Games are also highly political. The Australian authorities have seized the opportunity to celebrate Australia as a modern, vibrant, multicultural, capitalist democracy.
Australians are keen to show that they have moved far ahead of the whites-only immigration policy, which lasted until 1966, and that no one now listens to Pauline Hanson, the One Nation Party leader, who declared four years ago: "I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians." Of course, there are people in Australia for whom the arrival of European settlers from 1788 on was a national catastrophe and for whom the Olympic Games are an irrelevancy.
Indeed, the Aboriginals see the Games as an opportunity to highlight what is, at last, being acknowledged domestically as Australia's shame, the seizure, not just of the Aboriginals' land, but of their children - a "stolen generation" of as many as one in 10 Aboriginals, forcibly removed from their parents between 1910 and 1971 under government policies aiming at "civilising" them.
The story of the Aboriginals, who not much more than 200 years ago were the sole possessors of Australia's three million square miles and now form only two per cent of the 18.8 million population, is one of dispossession, prejudice, victimisation, alcoholism and social decay.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard has refused to apologise for the wrongs visited on the native population, saying "Australians of this generation shouldn't be required to accept guilt and blame for past actions and policy." But many Australian sympathisers will join the Aboriginals in protests associated with the Games.
Thus, the decision to give the Olympics to Sydney has forced Australians to look at themselves more closely. With its effort to promote "green games' it has also encouraged a focus on the environmental impact and set standards which other Olympic cities will feel obliged to imitate.
Coming up in eight years may be the next "communist" Olympics. Beijing, the last major Communist capital, is a hot tip for the 2008 Games. The city has already begun making plans to tackle its polluted atmosphere in anticipation of being selected next year.
Unless there is political change in China, however, it will likely be the old story of cleaning up and clearing out the undesirables, rather than confronting uncomfortable political realities and coming to terms with the core issues which define a nation.
