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 After
two weeks of pageantry and drama the Olympics are over, and we are sorry
to see them go. Our hat is
off to the genius who decided to stage the Games every four years on
the same timetable as the American Presidential elections. He or she certainly deserves a medal. Lord
knows we need the reminder, example and escape of good, clean, above-the-board
competition in the midst of the crass and craven cutthroat display of
political cynicism and savagery which our quadrennial election cycle
has become.
The US took home 103 medals in all, more than any other
nation, and an improvement on our results from four years ago in Sydney. However,
there are a couple of notes of caution in that rousing result, which
may not bode well for future events. First of all, for the first
time since the reinitiation of the Olympics in 1896 the US men did not
win a single team competition, a category that includes baseball, basketball,
volleyball, gymnastics, tennis doubles, handball, soccer, water polo,
badminton and table tennis.
In sports like soccer and baseball, the US men’s team didn’t
even QUALIFY, let alone medal. And what’s up with Basketball, eh? We owned
that sport, since the day Dr. Naismith nailed a peach basket to
the side of a barn, and this time had to struggle to win a bronze?
Not a good sign.
Of course, it is not surprising that we would win so many
medals in individual sports. The concept of rugged individualism
is under US copyright. Individualism is ingrained in our society, and
our ethos and economic system allow for individual athletes to strive
and suffer in well-supported solitude, with state-of-the-art individual coaching, nutrition
and motivation to hone their skills into World Champion range.
However, the last time we looked, teamwork was also a quintessential
American quality and part of the secret of our success. In fact, it was
perhaps our unique and novel national synthesis of individualism and
teamwork, qualities which can easily work to weaken each other, which
delivered us to global preeminence in the 21st century. Is it time to
wonder if the pendulum has swung too far towards rampant individualism,
team-be-damned, and as a result we have lost our edge in group activities?
Is individualism out of control?
Another note of caution is to be seen in the results of
the Chinese team. Once an awkward giant, a nation of peasants and agricultural
communes, happily content with obscure oriental sports like mahjong and
morning calisthenics, China has rapidly climbed the rankings and in Athens
earned a strong number two ranking, only three gold medals behind the
US.
The scariest part is that they left many of their best
athletes at home. Chinese authorities decided to bring a team of teenagers
to
Athens, trying to get them invaluable world-level competition as they
prepared for the 2008 Beijing games, eschewing more medals now for world
dominance four years down the road.
The Chinese Olympic surge is logical and inevitable. After
all, the have the largest talent pool on the planet, with, statistically
speaking, four or five Paul Hamms and Mia Hams for each one we can field. And
with a regimented and disciplined population and government support,
they have been combing the ranks of five and six-year-old kids for the
specific athletic talent and drive needed to reach the medals stand.
Add science, nutrition and state-of-the-art training methods to natural
talent like that, and it becomes unstoppable.
The next Olympics, like the Munich Olympics of 1936, are
set to serve as the coming out party for a rising world power bent on
asserting what it sees as a historical imperative – world dominance.
Whether that desired dominance will be entirely in the sports, political, cultural
and economic spheres, or like the Nazis will bleed over into the military,
remains to be seen.
However, let the Dowbrigade go on the record here and
now as predicting that in Beijing in 2008, the Chinese will displace
the Americans from the top of the medals charts. Whether that
will be a wakeup call or the death knell of the American century is
an open question. Between China vs. the US at the Olympics, and Hilary
vs. Jeb on the home front, 2008 is shaping up as a watershed year.
story from the Boston Globe
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