Another voice
Sporting life in Moscow
Auberon Waugh
The International Olympic Committee is a self-electing body of some 80 members.
Normally, there is only one member from any country, although we have two — Lord Exeter and Lord Luke, both 74. It decides which city should be awarded the honour of holding the Olympic games. The choice for next year was made in 1972, the year of the Munich massacre when 11 Israeli athletes, five Palestinian terrorists and one West German policeman lost their lives in an unsuccessful attempt to rescue the Israeli hostages. Los Angeles wanted the honour but the Committee decided otherwise.
It would be intriguing to know whether the present members of this august body judge that the decision to award the honour to Hitler's Berlin for the 1936 Olympics was a good one or not. One should never, if one can help it, put people in the disagreeable position of having to admit they made a mistake, but I should have thought that after this passage of time, when many if not most of the 1936 Committee must be retired, they might be prepared to consider whether that particular choice did anything to enhance the prestige of amateur sport and the Olympic idea, or whether, with the benefit of hindsight, it might have been the teeniest-weeniest bit mistaken.
For my own part, I have no interest in sport, finding politicians and competitive sportsmen almost equally repulsive, and would happily lock them all up together in Wembley Stadium to sort out their personality problems. But even I wonder whether the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin were quite what Hercules had in mind when he founded these gruesome events, let alone the idealistic French baron, Pierre de Coubertin, when he revived them in 1896.
When I heard that the present Committee, under its Irish president Lord Killanin, was intent on making exactly the same mistake 44 years later, I could scarcely believe my ears. It is true, of course, that Coubertin had some half-baked idea that they might contribute to World Peace: 'Let us export our oarsmen, our runners, our fencers into other lands,' he proclaimed at the Union des Sports Athletiques in Paris, 1892. 'That is the true Free Trade of the future; and the day it is introduced into Europe, the cause of Peace will have received a new and strong ally.'
He envisaged an entirely different sort of Olympic Games to the international meat market which has developed. Just as the Greeks originally allowed only free men to compete, regarding the muscular contortions of slaves as being of no more than biological interest, so the whole inspiration behind this revival was that it should be restricted to amateurs — leisured gentlefolk with nothing better to do. Although I have no reason for the suspicion apart from an analysis of his prose-style — 'Together we may attempt to realise, upon a basis suitable to the conditions of our modern life, the splendid and beneficent task of reviving the Olympic Games' —1 suspect that Coubertin, like many philhellenes of his period, was a pederast as well as being an aristocrat. One wonders what he would have made of it, if he had lived to see our splendid British football supporters beating up all the cities of Europe which offer them hospitality.
But the proletarianisation of sport offers no sufficient reason, in itself, for holding the Olympic Games in Moscow. Perhaps the Belgian President of the International Olympic Committee at the time of the Berlin Olympics in 1936 had a similar, half-baked notion that holding the Games in Berlin would somehow soften the Nazis' hearts and promote the cause of peace. Instead of which, as everyone knows, it was used as a gigantic propaganda exercise to convince the Germans that their government was seen as a respectable institution by the rest of the world, instead of being seen as a gang of bloodthirsty lunatics.
Which is exactly the purpose the Moscow Olympics will serve for the cynical thugs in the Kremlin. But objections to the choice of Moscow are more immediate than that. Many countries would welcome the influx of tourists and so, after a fashion, does Russia, but only on its own terms. The Soviet Government has always had a terror of its citizens' meeting foreigners.
Obviously, a high level of surveillance can't be maintained over all the thousands of sports enthusiasts who will flock to Moscow to watch these puffing lumps of meat chase each other around the arena, but if previous experience of the International Youth Festival of 1 957 in Moscow is anything to go by, Muscovites are in no less peril for that reason. Wulf Zalmanson, who was released from a Soviet labour camp last April, testifies that he met many prisoners in the camps who had been arrested for communicating with foreigners at the Youth Festival and were still there 13 years later.
It has already been announced that school children and students will be moved out of Moscow for the duration of the Olympic games to save them from contamination by foreigners,but One wonders what else, exactly, is involved in the 'cleaning up' operation which the Moscow authorities have set in motion. It seems probable that Soviet Baptists and Jewish activists will also be moved out, but the worst times lie ahead for those who stay behind and are caught passing the time of day with matey, half-witted sports enthusiasts from all the three corners of the world.
In the past 20 years, the International Olympic Committee, whose main responsibility is to see that the Games are carried out in the spirit that inspired their revival, has betrayed its office in nearly every respect. I am not referring here to the enormous growth in the number of 'women athletes', as some of these lumps of meat, usually of indeterminate sex, are called, although I suspect that this development might not have pleased Coubertin, either. The first prerequisite of the revived games was that competitors should be amateur. Most countries no longer even pay lipservice to this requirement. In a country like Russia, the whole concept of the amateur is meaningless.
Coubertin was convinced —I do not know why — that the old Olympic Games were destroyed by politics, and his successors insisted in the first place that no member of the International Committee should accept instructions from his government which might interfere with his independence, in the second place that no competitor should be debarred, or discriminated against on the grounds of race, religion or politics.
It was this article of the Constitution, paradoxically enough, which the Soviet representative, Andreanov, invoked to press for the exclusion of South Africa, on the grounds that its athletes were all white. South Africa promptly agreed to field a mixed team, upon which the Black African members threatened to boycott the Ganles unless South Africa was excluded anyWa);• So South Africa was excluded, as IS Rhodesia, now, as well. The beautiful idea of the Games is that they are contested by individuals, not nations. The host country has to promise not to refuse a visa to any competitor, nor to exclude anyoqe by virtue of religion, colour or politics, and not to allow the Games to be used for any political purpose. The Soviet Union is about as capable of fulfilling the conditions—if pressed to fulfil them—as Mr Brezhnev is capable of winning the long jump. Lord Killanin's presidency has not been particularly distinguished one. I had hol)._et" for better. Under him, and before him, tn"; Games have lost their original purpose, anu it is hard to see that they have found anY other. But he is an Irishman as well Ampleforth man, and there is still a chanc., Let him wait until the Russians have boot!! their ludicrous Olympic City, shuffled th Baptists, Jews, students, schoolchildren .870 assorted dissidents around and let him announce to the world that since Mosc0v1.07. unable to meet the conditions it accepteeried. applying, the 1980 Olympics are canc How proud — and rightly proud — the ' could feel of him.
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