The Summer Olympic Games come but once every four years, something we’ve been reminded of, implicitly, every three and a half minutes as NBC’s television coverage hurries from one event to another. This time, the producer seems to say, we’re going to see everything; but in his or her wild attempt to show everything of importance at the games, we’ve seen nothing. There has been no opportunity to linger over the sports we see little more than once every four years–such as volleyball, gymnastics, and sprint cycling–because we’re too busy going from one to the other to the other. In its urgent attempt to place us everywhere at the games, NBC has placed us nowhere so much as in one place on the couch in front of our television sets. There is no attempt to place us in Seoul, South Korea (which, since the North Koreans decided to boycott the games, is now officially referred to as simply “Korea”), no attempt to set us in the stands at these various events. The games are being produced by a group of compulsive channel changers who believe they are normal in having an attention span of 200 seconds. It’s the Olympics as media event–like the presidential race as media event–something so overblown and self-involved that it bears little resemblance or pertinence to reality.
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So why do we come back, again and again? We were all reminded of why when Greg Louganis survived his crack on the head in springboard diving to come back and win a gold medal. Louganis is the sort of athlete in the sort of event that the Olympics are now about. Freed from the restraints of “amateurism”–which became difficult to define and unpleasant to enforce–the Olympics have become no longer a competition of talented kids, but a comparison of highly trained, professional artists so precise in what they do that it takes experts to tell the difference between a gold medal and tenth place. This was not the case in diving–where Louganis was obviously the class of the field–but it was the case in gymnastics, where the Soviet men were so amazingly and equally talented that even the experts couldn’t tell the difference between a gold-medal and bronze-medal performance and gave away three golds. Louganis is a beautiful athlete, and he would probably agree that he is working at a level where what is normally considered a sport becomes an art, but with his accident late in the diving preliminaiies all the problems and difficulties that these athletes are trained to cover up as a matter of course–all the training that allows one to step up on a balance beam and perform the same old routine spontaneously, as if it were a stroll in the park–this gloss was stripped away and we saw the sport in all its difficulty and its danger. We were immediately reminded of an Eastern-bloc diver who cracked his head on the solid, ten-meter-high platform while doing a similar dive four years ago. He fell limp into the water and died. Louganis, as we all know, returned to give us an early and exemplary reminder of what the Olympics are about–beauty, skill, courage, and of course that old war-horse grace under pressure. The dive immediately after his accident was a difficult, well-performed dive that scored the highest of the day.
Yet the coverage keeps pulling us away from these very human moments, first by inflicting what are supposed to be “human moments” upon us–such as when we see fathers and mothers or husbands or wives sitting in the stands, watching some loved one–then by the persistent interruptions, both to cover other events and to pay the bills with advertisements. One of the most hypnotic aspects of the Olympics is that most firms that have bought heavily into Olympic advertising time have produced their own special Olympic ads, which reappear again and again. Worst of the bunch by far are the Budweiser ads, which take gold and silver for obnoxiousness. The Spuds MacKenzie Olympic tie-ins take silver; but the worst, the most offensive ad is the bottled patriotism of someone walking into a bar, ordering a Bud, and getting emotional as a black boxer receives his gold medal and tears up at the playing of the national anthem. If this advertisement starred George Bush instead of some unknown actor it might at least be interesting as artifact. The most interesting competing ads are for Gold Star and Samsung electronics. Both use art to sell their products, but Gold Star uses stuffy, operatic music and high-art objects such as a Picasso painting. The Samsung ad shows a guy changing channels on late-night TV (stoned, or am I reading into it?), who finds that his Samsung channel-changer also works on a huge television screen outside in the street. We must have seen this ad 20 times during the Olympics–with its wide-world pop-culture film clips of Godzilla and Bullwinkle the Moose–but we still get an indescribably good feeling every time the guy settles his head against his hand to watch Alfalfa sing “I’m in the Mood for Love.” What a great ad; what a near-perfect metaphor for the games as they’ve been brought to us this year. Give it a 10 and the gold medal.
