About the Olympics

Posted by: donallan on: 22 July 2012

• In: Sport
• 10 Comments

The following post has been written ti try and find out what people think about the Olympics. Do they think they are a good idea or do they think they have reached their use by date?

Don’t be afraid to say what you think.
Regards,
Don Allan
dca@netspeed.com.au

Around the world today, and for the next month, people will be subjected to a continuous barrage of press, television and radio stories about the summer games of the XXX Modern Olympics due to start Friday 27 July, in London.
I ask you to note that I’ve said the XXX Olympics not the London Olympics to help prevent giving the impression that the Games have become extravagant decorations, expressed in physical terms, designed to adorn the face of the city where the games are being held.

Already in a sense, the Games are being used to give respectability to decadence which is the same situation that so worried Roman Emperor Theodosius in 393 AD, that he cancelled the Games. It took another sixteen hundred years for the Games to re-emerge.

When the idea of the Games re-emerged Governments saw them as a political tool that could help to hide the societal decay they had caused by their lack of moral and social responsibility. In fact if vested business interests hadn’t seen them as profitable business ventures and devoted followers of athletics seen them as a means of promoting sport I doubt the Games would have survived.

Another aspect of the Games that detracts from their possible benefit is that instead of uniting people as Pierre de Coubertin the founder of the modern Games wished for they have wars where no one is publicly killed. This is simply because the Olympic Games is a western concept that does not fit with the cultures of many nations. To some extent they help exacerbate national differences.

It must be said also that the Olympic motto Citius, Altius, Fortius, Latin for “Faster, Higher, Stronger,” composed by a Henri Didon, Dominican Priest and friend of Coubertin is unlikely to make unity any easier.

Indeed in the interests of unity perhaps a motto that conveys universality is needed or that all published material for future Games expresses the motto in the language of the nation where the Games are being held?
dca@netspeed.com.au