A mugs' game
Can we imagine life without the Olympics? It seems not. Even here on Canada's west coast, where some of the most reasonable and well-adjusted people on Earth come to grow old and die, the idea of two weeks of riotous athleticism, at a cost of billions, is irresistible. Vancouver is hosting the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. That means a fortnight of traffic jams, price gouging at hotels and restaurants, round-the-clock television coverage, posturing politicians, overbearing security and, oh yes, a hefty bill that will have to be paid when all the athletes and tourists go home.
If all this makes me sound cranky, well excuse me, but I'm a child of Montreal, and we will never forget. Back in the early 1970s, mayor Jean Drapeau, a man with Periclean delusions, decided his city would stage the most spectacular Games ever held. He hired Parisian architect Roger Taillibert and told him to build an Olympic site the world would never forget. But Mr Mayor, we asked, what about the cost? 'These Games,' Drapeau sniffed, 'can no more have a deficit, than a man can have a baby.'
Well, the deficit came to C$2.6 billion ($16.8 billion), which Quebecers are still paying, and Drapeau is immortalised in political cartoons as perplexed and very pregnant.
One of the legacies of the 1976 Games is the world's ugliest stadium, for many years the home of baseball's Montreal Expos. The Expos were so embarrassed to have to play in this raw concrete monstrosity that they eventually packed their bags and moved to Washington. It now stands empty, in the heart of a great city, like an unwelcome wreck from outer space.
The Montreal Olympics were such a shock to the system that in 1978, only two cities bid for the games, Los Angeles and Tehran. But Tehran was about to get into the hostage business, so the nod went to LA. The city had a condition: these would be the first sponsored Olympics. Hence, the 'Coca-Cola Games'. In 1981, Olympic organisers decided to drop the amateur rule, and in so doing, repudiated the ideal of 'honour and disinterestedness' expressed by the father of the modern Olympic Movement, Baron Pierre de Coubertin. Professional athletics and commercialism had hijacked the Games.
Seven years later, I was sitting in the stands in Seoul when the final blow came: a steroid-powered Ben Johnson breaking the world record in the 100-metre dash. Johnson swore he didn't do it, but any illusions I had left about the sanctity of sport were gone. There was more Olympic bad news to come - the bombing in Atlanta, funding scandals in Salt Lake City, a 70,000-man security force in Athens - but by then I'd lost interest.
In 2010, I'll be somewhere else.
