Thrills and spills

While I still like watching them, the Olympics don't inspire in me the same fanatic, glued-to-the-set devotion that they once did. That's a predictable consequence of adulthood, with its shifts in perspective and its limited leisure time.

But I wonder if there's also another reason: globalization has diminished the significance of the Games. The idea of nations coming together has lost its novelty and lustre; in the era of networks we're linked 24/7, every day out of every year. People in one part of the world are rioting over cartoons published in another part; companies located in country X are outsourcing labor to country Y; athletes train in the U.S. in order to compete for their home country, or vice versa. It's quaint to conceive of the Olympics as a "global event", when so much else fits that description.

I'm reminded of how disconnected we were, by comparison, when I was growing up. To listen to foreign media -- the BBC, for instance -- required a shortwave radio. Print media required a trip to a special bookstore or the university library. International events came to us via a half-hour network newscast, our window to the world. Half of Europe was behind the Iron Curtain. China was so remote as to seem almost lunar.

In that kind of environment, the Olympics were momentous. (They also took place less often than they do now, since Winter and Summer Games were combined). They carried the weight of the former world order, with its division into East and West, communist and capitalist. That provided a kind of overarching narrative which gave special power to the individual athletes' triumphs and disappointments. After the Wall came down, the Games quickly became demystified.

And that's a good thing, in some ways -- myths give us a filter for interpreting the world, but can stand in the way of perception. These days, I'm glad to enjoy the Olympics as simply a sporting event, rather than epic theater.

It's also interesting to look back and see how much of the world was excluded from the Olympics, especially the Winter Games. In the 1976 Winter Olympics, for instance, not a single country outside Europe, North America and the Soviet bloc won a medal. An alien studying old medal count lists might reasonably conclude that Liechtenstein was as important a country as Japan. China, home to a fifth of the world's population, didn't win a single medal at the Winter Olympics until Albertville in 1992. While the Olympics still aren't fully "global", at least they're becoming less Eurocentric.