It’s always the athletes lugging the mop, rubber gloves and disinfectant into the Olympics.
It’s always the task of the young and magnificent, who seek only the chance to test and prove the wonderful things they can do, to purify the ugliness of their grasping elders.
When the International Olympic Committee (IOC) cheerfully collaborated with Hitler in 1936, it fell to Jesse Owens to clean up the story. Sprinting and leaping, the brilliant Black man won four gold medals and redeemed the atrocity.
The IOC was no better in 1968, ho-humming as Mexican authorities shot students protesting their government. No better in 1972, when awful Avery Brundage, the longtime ogre at the head of the IOC, was muted in Munich as Israeli athletes were murdered. The Salt Lake City Games of 2002 revealed the unseemly tradition of IOC members taking bribes. For the Winter Games next year, the IOC is headed to Beijing, cozying up to another concentration camp regime.
As they say in Lausanne, Switzerland, home of the evil sports empire: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Athletes can be banned for taking a toke in their free time, but the portly grandees of the IOC pocket hundreds of thousands of dollars, cuddle dictators and saddle their venues with unpayable debts — all without consequence, thanks to the athletes. While their elders wallow, the youths run, swim, dive, vault, tumble, row and grapple their way into our hearts. The world forgives everything for the chance to see them in their glory.
In a few days, the IOC will force Japan, against the wishes of a vast majority of the Japanese public, to stage an Olympics in the middle of a pandemic. The prime minister has declared a state of emergency; the IOC says the show must go on. Though Japan is already reeling from a shortage of doctors and nurses, the IOC will divert hundreds, if not thousands, of health-care workers to try to prevent their folly from spreading disease around the world.
The Olympic promise to bring people together, always a bit fatuous, is a flat-out fraud this year, because the public is forbidden to attend these Games. This is about money and money only.
Not for the Japanese (or “Chinese,” as IOC President Thomas Bach briefly called them on Tuesday). For them, the Olympics will be a sucking financial wound. Predictably — one might say inevitably — the Games are billions of dollars over budget, and without tourists, revenue will be nearly nonexistent. Nor will the athletes profit, apart from a few breakout stars. The hosts spend billions; the athletes devote years; the fat cats pocket the dough.
The IOC wants credit for slightly loosening its ban on political protests by Olympic athletes. Forgive me for suspecting that they’re hoping a few podium demonstrations will steer the story away from their own moral bankruptcy. But I have a modest proposal for the athletes this year:
Protest the IOC.
Protest the multimillionaires who exploit your talents to furnish their mansions and stock their hotel suites with champagne. Protest your national Olympic committees, busy skimming whatever cream the IOC is too bloated to swallow. Protest the power of privileged popinjays who for years turned blind eyes to systematic cheating by the likes of Russian President Vladimir Putin, but won’t let teenagers take medicines prescribed for asthma and ADHD.
Everything Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote recently about the NCAA — “a massive money-raising enterprise" built "on the backs of student athletes who are not fairly compensated,” for example — can be said 10 times over for the IOC and its national committees. Take away the athletes and there would be no one to watch the despots of sport dress up in their blazers and prance through the opening ceremonies.
The Olympics cartel is more vulnerable than it has been in memory. After the IOC is done forcing an unwanted event on Japan, it will turn immediately to China for February’s Winter Games. China, whose leader recently dressed up like the mad tyrant Mao Zedong and threatened the free world with “broken heads and bloodshed.” No wonder the organization is running out of cities willing to host.
Now is the time for the world’s athletes to rise up — as the United States’ college athletes have done — to demand an Olympic movement that puts them first: their interests, their dignity, their safety, their values. Without them, the Olympics is worse than nothing at all. Without them, it is only bloat and blindness. If they are once again expected to redeem a misbegotten Olympics with their brilliance and beauty, they should at least come home with more than memories and — for a few — medals.
They should come home with the promise of change.
David Von Drehle writes a twice-weekly column for The Post. He was previously an editor-at-large for Time Magazine, and is the author of four books, including "Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year" and "Triangle: The Fire That Changed America."