Not to sound ungrateful or–heaven forbid–unpatriotic, but I found myself increasingly troubled by the stunning performance of the United States in the Winter Olympics. A home-field advantage is one thing, but from beginning to end in Salt Lake City it seemed the Olympic system that once hindered U.S. athletes and U.S. interests now provides an undeniable benefit to athletes supported by U.S. capitalism.
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That said, it takes a blind eye to look at this year’s winter games and not see how the current system benefits American interests. For one thing there are the new “extreme” events. The International Olympic Committee was driven by economics and by such competitions as the cable-TV-sponsored X Games to sanction sports like snowboarding and “freestyle” skiing, with the prime beneficiary being NBC, which has shelled out billions of dollars in fees for the rights to the games through 2008 and fully intends to get a return on its investment–in part by matching up advertisers with the young audience that is so difficult to attract. Of course, it didn’t hurt that snowboarding and freestyle skiing were huge here before they were Olympic sports, giving U.S. athletes a leg up. When U.S. snowboarders took gold, silver, and bronze in the halfpipe, it was the first U.S. medal sweep in a Winter Olympics in a half century.
What’s more, economic issues were clearly behind the International Skating Union’s decision to nip the judging scandal in the bud and grant a second gold medal to the Canadian figure-skating pair of Jamie Sale and David Pelletier after they lost in the finals to the Russian pair of Yelena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze. To be sure, I thought Sale and Pelletier should have won–the Russians were more intricate in their skating but also more flawed, while the Canadians seemed to be two bodies moving under the same impulse–and there was abundant evidence of hanky-panky surrounding the French judge. Yet the media drove the scandal, and it soon became apparent that what the ISU wanted to avoid was the loss of its legitimacy, which would jeopardize its financial underpinnings in sponsorships and, in a worst-case scenario, prompt the IOC to try to run its own skating events.
Bradbury with arms upraised, placidly, comically triumphant as Ohno and the other skaters struggled to their feet and the finish line, was one of the indelible images of the 2002 winter games. Those memorable images were plentiful. Bode Miller bouncing up off the snow and finishing his downhill run in the men’s combined skiing event, which allowed him to come from behind in his final slalom run for a silver. Finnish snowboarder Hekki Sorsa competing not in a crash helmet but a Mohawk. Swiss double-gold-medal ski jumper Simon Ammann in his Harry Potter glasses. The flayed-skin musculature pattern of the Canadian speed-skating uniform, especially as modeled by Catriona LeMay Doan. The cross-country skiers routinely finishing the 50-kilometer race with long strings of spittle hanging from their chins, beyond all concern for appearances. Croatia’s chunky Janica Kostelic winning three gold medals in Alpine skiing and missing a fourth by hundredths of a second to claim silver–the most dominating performance by a skier since Jean-Claude Killy swept what were then just three Alpine medals at Grenoble, France, in 1968. The joy and pride of the Canadian men’s and women’s hockey teams, after both won tense gold-medal games against the United States (it was the first men’s gold in 50 years for the country that invented the sport, and some of that time it didn’t bother to field a team because even its paid junior hockey players weren’t eligible). Michelle Kwan crying tears of disappointment as she skated to “Fields of Gold” in the figure-skating exhibition after the competition was over (she had obviously had other plans, but claimed bronze). Bobsledder Vonetta Flowers crying tears of joy alongside partner Jill Bakken at the finish line, as she became the first African-American to win a gold medal at the winter games. And finally Sale crying tears of rage as the Russian national anthem was played at the first medal ceremony immediately after the pairs final.
