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Fri. Aug 08, 2008

They're Coming, They're Coming, They're Here!

The Olympics begin tonight, stirring up a flurry of activity here on this site over the next 16 days. The Olympics have been near and dear to me since I was a young teenager. They’ve been a big deal on this site since I covered the 1996 Atlanta Games. Heck, there’s an entire category for the Olympics.

So I am very excited today. And very apprehensive, too.

You see, I’m pretty much an Olympics purist. There are those who will argue the Olympics are about politics, or the Olympics are about marketing, or the Olympics are about showcasing the host country. When controversy erupts surrounding the Olympics, it is usually about money, politics, drugs, or some media-made scrum.

The Olympics are about the athletes. All the rest is a parasitic sideshow.

But this time around, the sideshow is massive. And the stakes are high for a lot of groups. Like the Olympics itself:

“The Olympic Games are not that credible or relevant to most young people in the developed or developing world,” says Alex Balfour, head of new media at the London 2012 organizing committee.

The average age of viewers for the 2004 Games in Athens was over 40 and shows no signs of falling.

“I will maybe watch highlight shows on TV later in the evening but I can never see myself watching it live,” said Richard Cousins, a 19-year-old British student.

But fans expecting to visit the site to catch up on the day’s action in Beijing next month are likely to be disappointed because the IOC is having problems adjusting to the share-it-all ethos of the internet.

Digital revolution could be Olympics’ salvation

The stakes are high for companies who want to make a killing selling to the largest new market on the planet, a country with a young growing “middle class” (i.e., people with disposable income) that currently exceeds the entire population of the US (yes, there are 300 million Chinese who are considered “middle class”).

It already is Coke’s fourth-largest market, with consumer spending on soft drinks more than doubling since 2001. Executives expect China eventually will surpass the United States as the company’s top market.

For Atlanta-based Coke, the Beijing Olympics presents an opportunity to build its brand among China’s 1.3 billion people, while attaching its name to an event that gets worldwide attention and often transcends the field of play.

Coke paints China red for Olympic Games | ajc.com

Heck, even our two presidential candidates think the stakes are high enough to invest millions in the Games:

Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign is buying into NBC Universal’s Olympics coverage.

The McCain campaign made a last-minute $6 million ad buy, which tops the $5 million Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign announced last month it was buying during the Olympic Games, which begin Aug. 8.

Advertising Age: Going for Gold? McCain Makes $6 Million Olympic Buy

And the stakes are highest of all for China itself:

Last week, Beijing officials released a flurry of new regulations. On Wednesday, an Olympic organizing committee spokesman announced the government would block some Web sites in Olympic venues despite earlier promises to provide foreign journalists with unfettered access.

The major difference between the Beijing Olympics and previous games is that most Olympic organizing committees are restrained by strong legal systems, civic groups and tight budgets. But in Beijing “everything is controlled by the Communist Party,” said David Wallechinsky, an American writer and vice president of the International Society of Olympic Historians.

For Beijing residents, the prohibitions and admonishments have come in a flood of forms. The city has banned most outdoor restaurant seating, presumably to make things look neater, and has recruited hundreds of thousands of citizens to patrol streets and report illegal or suspicious behavior.

One Beijing district government posted signs last month instructing residents to refrain from asking foreigners personal questions about their ages, salaries and political views.

“The government is trying to achieve perfection in every way,” said Zheng Xiaojiu, a philosopher at Beijing’s People’s University. “Chinese care a lot about being praised by others.”

AJC: Olympics: A little luck, lots of work

While the Chinese government might be seeking praise, and hoping to show the world how modern and moderate they’ve become, they also have generated a lot of concern about how they might react to spontaneous protests during the Games. How they might react to the unexpected, which has unfortunately been a featured event in multiple Olympics.

While I am as concerned as anyone about the human rights violations of the Chinese government, their manhandling of Tibet, and have personally seen the impact of their “One Child” policy, I hope that for the next 16 days it can be about the athletes.

Naive? I hope not.

I definitely question the IOC’s selection of China to be the host. But it was not my choice, and it has been made. If anything goes wrong as a result, if there is anyone to pay, it should be the IOC ... after the games.

I suggested after the success of the Games in Athens four years ago that maybe it was time to return to the ancient tradition; one site for the Olympics, where athletes gather every four years to continue an ancient tradition and competetion celebrating the potential of the human body.

I truly hope that these Olympics prove that idea wrong, because that would mean that the spirit of athletic competition overwhelmed all other factors.