sortiwa
BY SOFO ARCHON
This is the transcript of a spontaneous talk.
The Olympic Games are way worse than you think, and that’s due to several reasons.
The first one is that, although the Olympic Games are celebrated as a symbol of international unity and sportsmanship, in reality they emphasize division and promote national rivalry.
You see, the athletes that compete in the Olympic Games represent their country. And the medals that they win are tallied by country. So in the Olympics, you essentially have different nations competing against each other via those athletes. So most of the people who are watching the Olympic Games identify with the athletes of their own nation, and they wish that they beat the athletes of other nations. In other words, the Olympic Games reinforce this nationalistic competitive spirit and ethic that underlies most of the conflict and violence and war that we see in the world today.
Now, I’m not against competition per se, especially when it comes to sports, but when you have that nationalistic framework, competition becomes perverted and sick. So where is the international unity that the Olympic Games supposedly promote?
As far as sportsmanship is concerned, the Olympic Games are in a sense quite unfair. The athletes might be fair, the rules of the Games might be fair, but have you ever noticed that the athletes that tend to perform the best in the Olympic Games are those who come from wealthier nations? Now why is that? Is it because those athletes are more talented or genetically superior? Not really. It is because they have access to better facilities, or they receive more funding and have access to more social support systems that athletes from poorer countries lack.
So the outcomes of the Olympic Games are a reflection of the economic disparities that exist between nations. But they also reinforce to some extent those disparities, because the winner athletes and the winner countries tend to receive more fame and more money in turn.
The second biggest problem associated with the Olympic Games is the economic and social costs that they have. To carry out the Olympic Games, tremendous amounts of money have to be spent. Now we are talking about billions of dollars — sometimes three, sometimes five, sometimes ten or even more. Money that could be better spent, that could be spent to actually enrich and benefit humanity, instead of creating this spectacle of competition between nations.
The money spent in the Olympics is wasted money. That money could instead go, let’s say, to poor people in order to help pull them out of poverty. That money could go to education, it could go to healthcare, it could go to sustainable agriculture, it could go to so many other things that could actually make the world a better place to live in. But no! The Olympics are obviously more important.
The third big problem associated with the Olympics, and perhaps the biggest one, is the environmental costs of the Olympic Games. To create the venues and the infrastructure and the security systems, and to transport the athletes and the officials and the spectators to and from the city where the Olympic Games take place, requires so much resource and energy consumption, and results in so much waste and pollution in a world that is already environmentally messed up due to human activity.
This only shows how much of an insane world we are living in. In a sane world, this would not happen. People would not allow this to happen. So it’s important to know about the reality behind the Olympics and to raise awareness about it, as well as to do something to help change it.
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