When we consider all these disappointments together though, they go a long way towards explaining how the Olympic games have developed a schizophrenic personality. By this, I mean veering from Olympiad to Olympiad from games meant to showcase either nationalist posturing (Seoul, Beijing, Rio de Janeiro), or those showcasing corporate prowess (Atlanta, Sydney, London). What they both have in common of course is a risible insistence on the global importance of the event - the games are seen as one of the few palpable manifestations of Humanity, of our drive to better ourselves in peaceful competition, of an opportunity for all men and women to participate in something greater than themselves - Citius! Altius! Fortius! Bullshit. It belies both the origin of the modern games, their development and their present role. When examined closer, the games surely should not be seen as much more than a manifestation of a defunct bourgeois-nationalist dream, now mutated into a neoliberal celebration of its global march, both in the form of the rising authoritarian neoliberal regimes such as China, as well as the late-capitalist elite restablishment in countries like Britain or the US. (I will not dwell on this for the present, David Harvey, Wang Hui or Slavoj Žižek, have much more to say) More than anger, I chose to explore my fascination with the bourgeois origin of the modern Olympics, with the appropriation of a gilded classical past on such a large scale. While Edward Said may have gotten many things wrong in his exploration of Orientalism, he certainly did point out the extent and size of the construction of a bourgeois identity, a collage of enlightened imperial antiquity, paternalistic protestant morality, optimistic capitalism and a belief in science. The Olympics thus served as a transnational bond for bourgeois-nationalist identities, a precursor to the globalised neoliberalism of today.
Britain and France, as one might imagine, both have competing claims to the modern Olympiad, though in reality, one must not forget then recently liberated Greece's role. Revolutionary France held a re-imagined games in the enlightened postmonarchist craze for all things ancient - this is certainly one element which distinguishes the modern games. Britain however, gave us the Wenlock Olympian Games; a quaint paternalistic event for the working classes, a mens sana in corpore sano for the masses (which also gives the name to one of the misshapen mascots of this year's games).
Greece however added the all-important aura of continuity with the ancient games, perhaps best exemplified by the statue of the Evangelis Zappas, the businessman who revived the Olympics in Greece. Dressed in a strict suit, waistcoat and shirt with a collar so starched it makes the marble seems rather too soft to portray it, his modern attire is then draped with a toga-like cloth, a laurel wreath in his right hand. The tension in his appearance is not without significance - Greek politicians of the era were quite dubious about the value of resurrecting a pagan ritual, preferring instead to showcase Greece as a modern, industrialising nation. It seems their resistance was overcome, perhaps once they realised that the modern Olympiad was in no way similar to the original; devoid of religious overtones, couched firmly in the bourgeois ideology of Progress, it was as ancient as the neoclassicist public buildings being erected around the world, with their porticoes, collonades, architraves, metopes and pediments all translated into the present, naked bodies changed into hard-working artisans, deserving civil servants and allegorical figures such as Industry or Trade. In short, using the language of antiquity, but refusing to acknowledge the true pagan, visceral and most of all sexual elements of it, their effort hollows out the past, steals its meaning and tames the wild. Just as Evangelis here, it's wearing a thick woollen suit, tie and collar separating the public face from the private body, but fancying itself in a toga nonetheless. And though Baron de Coubertin, the official founder of the modern Olympics, reportedly wanted to imitate the ancient games in all details, I imagine the conversation on athletic nudity and the practice of oiling the male body was a very short one. Instead, the Olympics became what they still are - a parade of national pride, of bodies disfigured by excessive training and pharmaceuticals, of athletes and coaches who care not about the practice of the gymnasium. They are akin to national expositions (indeed the Bejing Olympics and Shaghai Expo are often understood as two appearances of the same debutante), but as private power increases, they are increasingly also an exposition of corporate power - and I use the word exposition to distinguish it from mere advertising or sponsoring. And if one cares about what they represent, from the shopping mall to the brazen appropriation of space for private use, complete with razor wire, moats and traditional British CCTV, please give yourself what Iain Sinclair calls an 'Olympic ASBO' and repeat after me: Fuck the Olympics. Listen instead to the voices of the dirty London, the Londons as they still can be, as Fallen Empire have found, or read about the mechanics of space production and appropriation as explored by Anna Minton. In either case, you will have been rewarded with something more than a record time, flags hanging in well-lit auditoria, the smell of freshly painted plasterboard which will welcome the athletes to their temporary homes (which you too can own afterwards - please contact the Qatari royal family for brochures and pricing).And how ironically fitting that the games, resurrected from ancient Greece and given a new meaning through the appropriation and manipulation of the past, will this year take place just as another Greek practice, that of democracy, is being defiled by the likes of IMF, Germany or the UK. Just as the Olympics, Democracy cannot interfere with a debt-restructuring programme; democracy, even in its watered-down parliamentary form, cannot endanger the neoliberal project of dismantling the welfare state, it cannot challenge the ability of German capital to recycle profits in financial markets instead of passing it on to German workers, it cannot make Christine Lagarde or David Cameron accountable for their efforts in perpetuating the frugality narrative which masks a neoliberal debt-trap - the trap we have seen in action many times before: Mexico in the 1980s, Asia in 1997, Europe from 2008. No, democracy, we are told, must be measured, predictable, and 'inside the normal democratic process', in other words, devoid of its physical, naked, oiled self, restrained by a stiff collar, choked by a tie (in different colours!) and tied to a tree to be ridiculed. To that democracy, one can only answer with the same profanity as to the Olympics.
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