Seven observations on the Rio Olympics
On August 3-21, 2016, the 2016 Summer Olympics were held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. More than 11,000 athletes from 207 National Olympic Committees took part in 28 different sports across 38 different venues. Seven observations on these events follow.
1. Governments do not care about poor people. In order to build the Olympic venues, government officials in Rio displaced thousands of poor and homeless people, including many children. When affordable housing is demolished, it raises the price of other housing due to smaller supply and a new surge of demand. Food and transportation costs have also risen. The end result is that people are priced out of their own communities by state action. While government officials have claimed that the Olympic construction was done to improve the city, the ends cannot justify the means of eminent domain and forced relocation. Additionally, much of the construction does not address the most pressing concerns of Rio’s citizens, such as connecting more neighborhoods to the sewer system.
Another problem that has increased due to the Olympics is the amount of human rights violations against Brazil’s street children, many of whom are detained arbitrarily and put into an already overcrowded prison system. The government in Rio chose not to try to help the children who eke out a homeless existence on the streets while suffering from drug addiction, but rather to merely sweep them away from the eyes of international tourists. All of this is par for the course for governments. To quote Stefan Molyneux, “The government does not care about the poor as anything other than hostages to shame and capture the guilt of the innocent and force them to hand over additional money, rights, and children to the government.”
2. The Games serve to glorify the state at the expense of the individual. While the competitions are won and lost by individuals or teams thereof, these are almost always tied to a nation-state. It is always said that athletes win medals for their countries, and the award ceremonies always feature the national anthem of the nation that sent the gold medalist athlete, along with the flags of the top three finishers in the event. This amounts not to a celebration of individual achievements, but a garish display of jingoistic nationalism. The host nation-state forces its taxpayers to fund a spectacle in which a sort of cold war is conducted by having each nation-state’s champions vie for supremacy. It would be far better to privatize the entire process so that nation-states are deprived of a propaganda tool.
3. Some activities simply cannot be made safe. Every Olympics features its share of athletes suffering injuries (10-12 percent), and the 2016 Summer Olympics were no exception. Despite all of the precautions taken, athletes who push themselves to the top level of competition in strenuous activities sometimes get injured, especially when going for a medal means exceeding what one has done in training. The only way to prevent all of the injuries would be to eliminate all of the activities, so it is better to leave the athletes to take their own risks, reap their own rewards, and suffer their own consequences.
4. It is important to pace oneself in any task. This is a lesson which is frequently displayed across various athletic events, but it bears repeating. Those who put too much effort into the beginning of a long and/or arduous task will have difficulty in finishing. Many runners exhaust themselves in leading the pack of competitors for most of a race only to lose at the end because a less tired runner who managed to hang back just behind the leader is able to muster a sprint for the finish line to overtake the pace-setter up until that point. This happened in several medium distance races in Rio.
Another example of this phenomenon occurred in men’s weightlifting for the superheavy weight class. Behdad Salimi, the gold medalist from the 2012 Summer Olympics, set a new world record in the snatch only to fail all three of his attempts at the clean and jerk, meaning that he failed to post a total and won no medal.
5. Performance-enhancing drugs will always be one step ahead of detection methods. This is unavoidable, as there is no real incentive to test for a drug before it is known to be manufactured and used. While many users get caught, and punishments are handed out (such as the banning of many Russian athletes from the 2016 Games), many more do not. There are many incentives which create this problem. As Dr. Cayce Onks, a family and sports medicine specialist at Penn State Hershey Medical Group, explains, “Anyone who gets a gold medal has the benefit of TV contracts, announcer gigs, commercials and all the money that comes with it. It’s not just the prestige and satisfaction of competing at that level and winning. Tenths of seconds can mean the difference between a medal and no medal, so whatever they can do to get that extra tenth, they want to try.” As for other incentives…
6. An interesting spectacle is more important to many people than honest competition. While the Olympics are somewhat hit-or-miss in terms of being a financial boost for the places that host them, they are always a cash cow for the television networks that air footage of them. Ratings go up for performances that push the limits of human capability, as well as for athletes who have a reputation for delivering such performances. It was Usain Bolt in the 2016 Summer Olympics, but it is always someone. The advertisers, the International Olympic Committee, the doping testing agencies, and everyone else involved are fully aware of the incentives here, and it would be exceedingly foolish to believe that they never respond to the incentive to let some athletes break doping rules.
7. Human biodiversity clearly exists. Finally, the Summer Olympics should be a quadrennially sounding death knell for the idea of blank-slate egalitarianism. That certain events are almost always won by people with ancestry in particular population groups cannot be explained solely by the sum of culture, training, government funding of sports, and other nurturing elements. Humans will adapt to their environment like any other organism, and those adaptations can give members of a particular population group an advantage in a particular activity. While these adaptations can be noticed in people who move to another place and live as the locals do, the extent of the adaptations which are present in a population group that has inhabited a place for many generations cannot be replicated in one human lifetime. These differences are not nearly large enough at present to categorize humans into different species or subspecies, but they were in the past and very well could be again in the future. While this will not affect the average person’s daily life, it will determine who has the extra performance capacity needed to win Olympic gold when other factors, such as diet, training regimen, and rest, are nearly equal.
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