Time to downsize
Taki
Gstaad
Athens is a city that thrives on rumours, and the latest is that the tae kwon do medals had been assigned to the various winners before the competition began. It is obviously just that, a rumour, and a false one at that, but among the martial arts community which has been left out of the Games the rumour is very, very credible.
Tae kwon do should never have been an Olympic sport. It was included because the South Koreans cajoled and twisted arms for it to be. It is a prefabricated sport, a copy of karate, without any trace of a martial art. It is kicking without focus, a type of touch rugby without tackling. Time and again we saw a player kick the air near his opponent's head, then fall on his back and be awarded a point. What it comes down to is flicking with one's feet, a diluted version of kick boxing without the boxing or blocking. Actually, it is a disgrace. The judging was so subjective, the South Koreans so ubiquitous as coaches and trainers of most teams that the rumours were inevitable.
Thai boxing, on the other hand, is a distinct sport which has evolved over many years, and is practised all over the world by amateurs and professionals alike, the trouble being that the Thais are too poor to bribe a la Koreans. Ditto my own art, karate. We are too split to present a united front and enter the Games. And speaking of them, I was heartbroken to leave Athens for karate camp in Gstaad, and now I wish I hadn't. I pulled a muscle on day one and have limped through the rest of the week. Still, it was better than sitting in front of a TV set. The warm and fuzzy Olympics, as a New York Times editorial rightly called them, are now a thing of the past, yet despite their incredible success, it is time to trim the Olympics back to its basics: 11,000 athletes are too many and too unmanageable.
Football, baseball, softball and tennis should he dropped immediately. The yardstick should be order of importance. In football, the World Cup counts far more than an Olympic medal. Ditto the World Series in baseball and a Grand Slam in tennis. (Softball is an American feminist perversion, the equivalent of pitching pennies against the wall, or shooting marbles.) Beach volley also has to go, bikinis or no bikinis. The other thing that has to go is the defrocked Irish priest who tackled poor Vanderlei de Lima during the marathon. The Greek court which fined him 3,000 euros and gave him a one-year suspended sentence should be suspended. This pest should have been put away for at least three years pour encourager les autres. What we face now, because of this professional attention-seeker, is other lukattni' artists pulling off stunts at the expense of people who have been training for years for their hour of glory, only to be deprived of it by vermin like him. I will not mention his name nor should anyone else. I know the Chinese would have dealt with him differently. Alas. we Greeks have truly joined Europe and have turned soft like everyone else on the old Continent.
Be that as it may, we now move from passion to inscrutability. The Chinese will showcase their system in a manner which will put the Berlin Olympics of 1936 to shame, The Chinese do not suffer from a siege mentality. There will be no tolerance for anything which goes against a Chinese victory, and they will win everything as they have 1.3 billion people to choose from. They will pack every site with humanity, outcheer everyone else, cover every space with red flags and government slogans. They will make the Athens Games look like Chariots of Fire, And speaking of those chariots, a reader has pointed out that I was wrong to write that Greece is the smallest country to host the Games. It was Finland, with the Helsinki Games of 1952. Of course, the reader's right. and I knew it well as my uncle was head of the Greek mission that year. But the Olympics were still amateur games back then, with a few hundred athletes competing. They changed for ever after Rome in 1960, with Tokyo, and it's been downhill ever since, But the Parthenon Games will be long remembered for their warmth after the Chinese have turned us all into robots.
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