SPECTATOR SPORT
Marinated in Coca-Cola
Simon Barnes
I WAS sitting at a cafe in Syntagma Square, mouth tingling with ouzo and head tingling with Ancient Greek bullshit. In 1896, the first Olympic Games of the mod- ern era were held in Athens. Athens thought it would be only sensible to hold the games of 1996 in the same place, and as the bidding between rival cities built up to a climax six years ago they suffered an attack of last-minute nerves and invited me to come and see them.
`The Olympic ideals', they thundered jovially, or zeusly rather, 'will be washed clean in the streams of Mount Olympus.' Oh no, they won't, I thought. They will be marinated in Coca-Cola. The fine trinity of virtues offered by Athens — chaos, arro- gance, bullshit — managed to alienate key members of the International Olympic Committee fairly comprehensively. Thus the games went to Atlanta in the United States of America, the headquarters of the Coca-Cola corporation, where they kick off this weekend. Well, it had been an age since the games were last held in America: no doubt the IOC felt that the world will have got over the orgy of triumphalism that greeted the 1984 games in Los Angeles.
For many Americans the central event of the games will be the basketball. This is Only partly because in the past decade or so basketball has displaced baseball as the national game. It is also because the USA will field the Dream Team. In the days of
'amateurism', America was forced to field a team of college kids, but these days they have the Dream Team of superstars. Its members are some of the highest-paid sportsmen in history and include both 'Sir' Charles Barkley and Karl 'the Mailman' Malone (he always delivers). The first Dream Team won the gold medal in Barcelona in 1992 by an average of 43.8 points a game, which is ridiculous: the West Indies in a village cricket competi- tion. They enacted the age-old story of Giant the Jack-Killer, performing a ritual dance whose message is that America is the most powerful nation on earth.
The Dream Team performing live in the home of Coca-Cola will be a festival of jin- goism and triumphalism, and it might prove faintly indigestible to those of finicky appetite. But it is more than lust for dollars that brings the Olympic Games to Atlanta, just as it is more than jingoism that gives the Dream Team worldvAde adulation.
You have only to ,check into your hotel in Atlanta to realise this. Even if, by chance, there is a white face visible behind the reception desk, you aim for one of the black faces, for you seek competence, self- confidence, charm: someone utterly on the ball. The duty manager at the desk is black too. So, if you lose a filling, is your dentist. Atlanta has a glowingly ambitious black middle class.
Atlanta campaigned for the games with Andrew Young as one of its driving forces. He had been aide to Maftin Luther King, American ambassador to the United Nations and then mayor of Atlanta. He is one of those men whose personality fills a room, or a hall, a person utterly certain of his place in the world, a man of obvious worth. And the poorer nations rallied to his cause, which was the cause of Atlanta, because he was an embodiment of both aspiration and decency.
The Dream Team is also about aspira- tion. Basketball players are mostly black, and yet they have risen — more or less lit- erally — above every possible disadvantage to reach the love, affection and dollars sup- plied willingly by the United States. Atlanta's victory, the Dream Team's inevitable triumph, these are not America's but the world's dream: to rise above disadvantage to triumph, to take on America and win. But the dream, to be believable, must be washed down with Coke.
Previous page
