About the Olympics

The best and the worst of humanity were on display.

The olympics are now over. I put a lot of other activities aside to watch them. I have logged many hours in front of my teev, remote in hand, zipping through all the boring stuff and repeats, chatter from commentators who have no idea what they are talking about, commercials, and so on and so on.

I dropped into the interesting stuff, which was almost always where women were doing the competing. I have long felt that women’s sports are vastly more entertaining than men’s. I do not know why that needs any explanation.

Most Canadian Olympics watchers seem to agree with me. The Canadian Bullshitting Corporation, the main broadcaster of international events in Canada, are clearly aware of this tendency. More women’s than men’s events got covered. Women athletes got mikes in their faces more often.

Canadian women athletes clearly agree as well. They consistently deliver about twice as many medals as the men. The men should all just go home.

As for the entertainment value of females, I do make an exception for the wussy things like artistic gymnastics and synchronized swimming. I wish the practitioners the latter would all just synchronously drown.

There are some sports which are awful, no matter which gender is doing it. This includes water polo, all these activities which happen on a bicycle on oval track, and the worst of the worst; ‘power walking’. Humans are not designed to walk fast, and look awful doing it. We are designed to either walk at normal speed or to break into a run.

There are some things I like which are not widely popular and are only partly covered at the Olympics. One is horse jumping. Many witty fellows suggest putting the medal on the horse, but the horse could not do it by his or her self.

Yes, women look great jumping horses, too. Horses are beautiful animals, including the females.

Another favorite of mine which is not always so popular is archery. I did not get to see nearly enough of the Dianas this year.

Many very old sports still lend themselves to well to televising. But many of these newer sports are very good. So are updated versions of old ones.

A good example of the latter is three on three basketball. I find regular basketball really boring. But when you reduce sides to three players and shorten the matches to ten minutes, you really have something.

I loved the skateboarding and other “park” events. Also climbing, as in climbing up those walls by trying to hold onto, and get past, those plastic projections. Breaking is new to the olympics this year and I will trade one breaker for twenty artistic gymnasts.

I am not interested solely in short and dramatic events. The marathon and road cycling are relaxing events worth watching. They are like taking a drive from central Paris out to the countryside and back. I can see what Paris looks like outside the tourist traps and occasional news stories.

My best moment of these Olympics was when a wrestler won the gold medal bout in the heavy weight category. She ran over and hugged and kissed her coach. Then she picked him up and carried him around the ring.

What is so good about the multisport events is, things are always changing. When one thing is over there is something else to watch. You can put everything aside, stockpile the snacks, and make an event out of it. It is not the same thing over and over for days. It is not just a couple of hours and done.

Now that I have established myself as a die hard Olympics fan, I will deal with the philosophical quibbles about the institution.

Is there a message here?

The Olympic opening and closing shows got many people into a sniffet. I was impressed with them, overall. What I really loved was the silvery robotic horse galloping over the river Seine with a live female riding it, to deliver the Olympic flag.

Instead of holding it in a stadium, it all floated down the Seine, stopping at intervals to watch little performance art type shows. One section which annoyed people was the drag version of the “Last Supper” painting. It was sacrilegious, by God!

Many were disturbing by the apparent “impending doom” theme of the show. We had Marie Antoinette singing something in French with her head under her arm. The most striking thing was the hooded and faceless doom figure who wove through the whole ceremony and carried the torch part of the way.

Many people seemed to think the show was slagging Christianity, French or western civilizational values, creating a sense that the Olympics and everything else were doomed and collapsing, and so on. I think that was partly the point of the show.

Despite the complaints, the doom and rebirth theme continued in the closing ceremony. We got a performance of a kind of science fiction story in which the Olympics had vanished from a future earth. A space visitor drops down on earth and finds remnants of the Olympics and decides to relaunch it.

So he brings his little gray work crew down to earth and sets it up again. Earth comes back to life and all is happiness again. So, what is the message here? Will the Olympics need to be once again revived after a dark age, or is it civilization itself?

I have noticed that some other Olympic opening shows have deliberately contradicted the narratives of the country’s ruling elites. That is what you tend to get when you hire the country’s best artists to create a ceremony. Especially, when said elites have become highly discredited and the public disaffected.

A good example of this was the London Olympics of 2012. There, the conservatives had recently come back into power and were continuing the slow destruction of Britain’s social infrastructure. So the opening show was all about Public health care, Public transportation, Public housing, and how much British people like it and want to keep it.

So the “Doom”, social degeneration, and impending shakeup theme really needs no explanations or apologies. Every one with half a clue knows things are not going well for the Olympics, for France, for Europe, or the rest of the western world, right now. We are on the brink of a very large shakeup.

In all, it was a very French production. There is an old saying about art and entertainment; nobody is more violent than the Americans, nobody is funnier than the British, and no one is weirder than the French.

Absolute Purity, Please!

The biggest, oldest gripe about the Olympics are the things which need to be “got out of it”; mostly, money and politics. In fact, the Olympics are not so corrupt in a strictly monetary sense. The corruption is actually deeper and more harmful than that.

We do not have the mug level grifting and grafting which goes on in many sports leagues. Matches do not get fixed. The stories of cities spending huge sums bribing IOC (International Olympic Committee) members for the privilege of spending huge amounts of money for the huge prestige of holding an Olympics, are exaggerated.

The French games were notable for their lack of corruption. The French organizing committee did run a hustle on ticket resellers; selling them blocks of tickets at a high price, then releasing new blocks of tickets at a lower price. It is hard to have much sympathy for ticket resellers.

The most corrupt thing about the Olympics has always been that it is a closed club for European aristocrats and other old money people. Crypto Nazi attitudes are prominent among them. They all have exorbitant salaries in addition to other funding sources they likely inherited, and do not need to bother with gifts under the table.

Thus, the Olympics are really a big party for the old Atlanticist financial elite which has ruled the world for three centuries. This is going into a rapid decline. This is a big part of the reason why the Olympics are in a crisis.

The ninety percent of the world outside of the “golden billion” no longer accept the latter running things to suit themselves. They are demanding changes to global institutions in many fields. This includes the Olympics, which are thus on the brink of a serious reconstruction.

Sporting Politics

People keep talking about getting politics out of the Olympics. What people normally mean by “politics” in the Olympics is the banning or the harassment of countries on the hegemony’s enemy list. Increasingly, people also talk about the way certain countries are favored.

All this politics seems to come from the IOC itself as an extension of the Atlanticist hegemony. This means Russia in particular is singled out for ‘politics’. For over a decade WADA, world Anti Doping Agency, the enforcement mechanism for the Olympics and some other international sports organizations, has been totally ridiculous about harassing Russian athletes.

With incredible pettiness, Russians athletes were not allowed to fly their flag or hear their anthem. Then Russia did what it had to do with Ukraine, and this was the pretext to ban them altogether. If you really need that point explained to you, check the ‘global’ and ‘Ukraine war’ tags of this blog.

But it brings hypocrisy to a new level when the Israelis, after what they are doing, are not also banned from the Olympics. The reasons falsely stated against the Russians would be quite valid in their case. But Israel is a protected project of the Atlanticist hegemony, as per tag ‘zionism’.

Palestine had to be allowed to compete. Yet it is amazing they managed to send anyone, due to the Israeli policy toward any Palestinian who does anything notable, or contributes to any sense of Palestinian identity and confidence. An incredible number of their top athletes have been killed or wounded by the Israeli army. Their training facilities have been destroyed.

The Iranians made a good showing at the Olympics but there are moves afoot to ban them as well. Originally the reasons were ridiculous, but now with Iran having to defend itself from Israel, some pretexts are available.

Were there any sensible criteria for banning any country from competing in the Olympics, there are three countries which would be banned. These are Ukraine, Israel, and the United States. These are the only countries which are truly dangerous to other countries and other people.

The problem of Ukraine will soon go away. If there was any country at the 2024 Olympics guaranteed to not exist by 2028, that is it. There is a good chance Israel will not exist by then either, except as part of some transitional federation.

The United States is more problematic. Discussing this is a few blogs in themselves, but the Americans are an established people. They will not go away.

A big problem with the Americans, themselves, is they have a hard time distinguishing themselves from their government and from their ruling oligarchy. Probably by 2030 this government and oligarchy will fall, and the American people will be able to define themselves in a better way and develop in a healthier way.

Returning to the topic of doping, as long as there is politics in sport, there will also be doping. It is not just about driving down or excluding rival countries, but pushing up favoured countries. Aside from corrupt officiating, the best way to achieve that is through doping.

With modern chemistry, dopers will be caught unless they are shielded by corrupt enforcement. WADA itself has developed some integrity in recent years, pushing back against pressure to frame the Russians and Chinese. So ways have been found around it by forcing it to defer to certain national doping agencies.

An open feud has developed between WADA and the American doping agency, USADA. The latter is allowing dopers to get away with it on the lame pretext of using some caught dopers as informants to catch other dopers. This is a rationalization often used by corrupt American police for allowing certain criminal gangs and individuals with an ‘in’ to operate with impunity.

There is also the problem of “therapeutic exemptions”. This means, allowing athletes to use performance enhancing drugs as treatment for a supposed medical condition. This amounts to back door doping.

Three countries are doing most of the therapeutic doping, er, exemptions. These are the United States, Australia, and France. The first is expected. The latter two are disappointing.

Covid Came to Play

Part of the Atlantic oligarchy’s approach to the continual covid pandemic is to demand that everyone else pretend it is all over, or not so bad anymore, somehow. Yet they keep themselves well protected, with “Davos standard” measures. The rest of the world does not really buy this, but the Atlantisphere still makes the rules for most international sport.

For the Athlete’s village, IOC had a “you do you” approach. Some national sports federations adopted strong protocols for their players. With others it was, “go out and play or drop dead”. It is hard for the covid conscious teams to fully protect themselves in the close quarters of an athlete’s village.

There seemed to be no consideration of the safety of volunteers or paid staff working on the games, or for the audiences watching. You can be sure the bright and beautiful of IOC were inside their own bubble, with no untested person entering, with high quality air filtration and UV sterilization.

Athlete’s villages are famous for spreading airborne viruses. Proper preventive measures are never a priority; athletes are supposed to be tough, they are just high grade meat which sports business makes money off, after all. Performances are often effected by who caught a bug the day of the race.

Covid is, as we all know, or should know, far more potent that a mere cold or flu. It can seriously effect even young, superfit athletes. The ‘long covid’ effects from an infection suffered years ago can still be slowing an athletes performance.

I have been watching multisport events for some years now. I have never seen these kinds of effects. They would throw up during TV interviews.

Every day I watched another athlete collapse on the track or the grass, with no injury, and have to be carried off in a stretcher. Every day there was another empty starting block, as someone had to drop out of a race for unexplained reasons. I watched several races of various kinds, where the field seemed much more spread out that I have ever seen.

Many social media commentators described the same impressions as me. Some said athletes from countries with stronger covid prevention programs, in their home countries and at the games, did significantly better.

There were said to be fewer records broken this year. Average times were slower. The spreads between the top finishers and the field were said to be much wider. Many athletes who had been performing very well in previous venues had no zip at these games. Many quietly dropped out. Some did not show up at all.

It is likely that a lot of these gold medals were in avoiding covid infection.

Other Dramas

Another form of cheating which has gone on as long as sport has been a business, is spying on the opposition. Most country’s sports organizations have developed sophisticated ways of learning how their opponents are training. Some of them likely have their country’s secret services helping with this.

The Canadian women’s soccer team got caught spying and were severely penalized. In good old Canadian fashion, they did it in a very amateurish way. They were all mortified at getting caught, like everyone else does not do it, and the lower level people took the fall.

In typical Canadian fashion, the higher management almost certainly ordered this but covered their asses. The Canadian soccer organization is very contemptuous toward the players, who in Canadian fashion just sucked it up and keep playing.

So the Maple Leaf ladies were stuck with the nearly impossible task of overcoming a six point penalty in pool play. They had to win every game. They described being unable to sleep, wandering around banging their heads against the walls.

They did it, against some strong teams, with most of their coaching staff sacked and not replaced. They got into the ’round of sixteen’. They went up against the very powerful German team, which later took the Bronze medal. The game went to a shootout and they lost the final kick.

Another weird thing about women’s sports is this fixation on women’s hormones. This was on display in the experiences of two women boxers, Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu -Ting of Taiwan. They were accused of being transgendered, which they were obviously not.

They were barred from competing by the International Boxing Association, which often makes strange decisions. IBA never explained why. However, IOC removed IBA from regulating Olympic boxing and allowed Khelif and Lin to come and participate with the other women in smashing each others faces and brains.

The IOC has learned some hard lessons about trying to regulate female body chemistry. For awhile they tried to make a poor south African runner take drugs because her testosterone level was too high. They now seem prepared to let women have the bodies and body chemistry they were born with.

In recent years a new complication has arisen. Elements of the Atlantic elite have decided they do not accept binary genders. Further to this, they do not accept that persons born as men cannot compete as women, even after undergoing so called “gender reassignment”.

This is as looney as it gets. And inevitably, it gets an equally looney response from the looney right.

Reality is that this push for transgenderism is not getting anywhere in any significant way. There are a handful of trannies who have been able to integrate into women’s sports, but usually it just does not work. Yet there are a lot of scare stories generated by the loonie right misinformation machine.

The radical right screwheads are convinced that there are transgendered people everywhere, coming to get them. Yet they do have a point in that there are only two genders; XY, male Chromosome and XX, female Chromosome. Trying to invent an intermediate condition is silly.

Yet there are many conditions in which a person’s chromosomes get messed up. I am not going to deliver a biology lesson here. But people with these problems almost always tend to one gender or the other.

There is something called Swyer’s syndrome, which is surprisingly common. A person has an XY chromosome, but has a female body. They are not overly masculine, can often bear children by embryo implant, but cannot conceive children.

The buzz on social media is that this was IBA’s problem with Khelif and Lin. This syndrome seems to give many women an advantage as athletes.

However, as something they were born with, it is unjust to bar them from competition because of it. If we start doing that, we are on a very slippery slope. Do we start banning women over six feet from competing in basketball or volleyball?

It is not as though Khelif has not been beaten by women. Irish boxer Amy Broadhurst beat her at the world championships of 2022. She strongly defended Khelif on social media.

To the conclusion

So, Olympics 2024 are a wrap. As it was intended to be, it is a microcosm of the world in general. It also reflects the world in ways its founders did not intend.

A lot of the world’s hypocrisies are demonstrated there. Powerful nations, or nations which think they are still powerful, still demand that everyone follow their rules. The wealthy and influential create secure and lucrative positions for themselves. The athletes, without whom there are no Olympics, are exploited and treated as dispensable; the proletariat of sports.

If the Olympics seem to be in a difficult time right now, so is the world. As with the world, the solution is a change in the way it is run. Change will come last to fossilized institutions like the Olympics, after everything else has been reconstructed.

The world really does need something like the Olympics. They will be hard to replace. They are not going out of existence anytime soon.