Ian McDonaldTHE OLYMPICS are due to open in a couple of months. As the athletes begin to parade the last touches will just have been applied to the facilities. Still, the Games will proceed and for a couple of weeks the eyes of the world will be focused on the greatest sporting event of them all.
Sadly, the eyes of the world will also be focused on a virtual battlefield. This is because this Olympics has become a prime target for terrorists in their unwavering campaign to convince the world that their self-sacrificing cruelty is invincible. Well over a billion US dollars is being spent on security at this Olympics. This "essential wastefulness" is a staggering expense in a needy world.
However, Athens will in any case be a battlefield because competition between rival contestants in professional sport has become all too often like clashes between combatants in war.
It is strange how the words sport, game, play, which in the dictionaries are associated with fun and frolic, have more and more lost their original meanings.
In recent times sport has become a very serious business. At the highest-level games are no longer associated with fun and relaxation. The physical workload that a man undertakes to become a champion is as hard as that of any labourer in the field or mine worker in the depths of the earth. Sport at the top is a business, a profession, a career, a way of life, a hard and daily occupation, a harsh routine - sometimes an obsession. And international sporting competitions are as far removed from the old-time friendly rivalry on the field as war is from training manoeuvres. Countries feel they have to prove themselves, come what may, in every sporting contest. National prestige is at stake, patriotic machismo put to the test, in every national competition. Scoring a goal now in a big match is like capturing a border town in the old wars.
You cannot escape the terrible seriousness of sport. Diplomatic relations between two Commonwealth members were sorely strained at the time of England's "bodyline" cricket tour of Australia. Latin American countries have actually gone to war in the wake of angrily disputed football matches. Israeli athletes were massacred at the Munich Olympics in the cause of Palestinian nationhood. Presidents and Prime Ministers the world over commonly seek to rub a little reflected glory on their political images as they dispatch congratulatory telegrams to their victorious teams. Remember how the front-line in the fight against apartheid in South Africa was occupied by sportsmen and particularly by cricketers.
And so with sport now more and more associated with big-time money on the one hand and big-time politics on the other, it is becoming less and less fun. I do not condemn or applaud this development - with a sigh of regret one accepts it as inevitable. I definitely miss the fun and humour that is gradually being lost. Consider the sporting commentators these days - they are so solemn and straight-faced. The accounts we read of matches and competitions are like despatches from some military campaign. To lose is much too often considered a national humiliation. These days everything about big-time sport is too tense and strained and fraught with most serious consequences for my liking.
Ian McDonald is a regular contributor who lives and works in Georgetown, Guyana.
