Afloat in financial prosperity yet adrift in the ethical and moral bankruptcy of managerial corruption and athletes’ doping, the Olympic Games enter the new millennium with a sense of paradox reflected by the map and the calendar.
When what are often called the Summer Games officially open Friday with a ceremony at Olympic Stadium, it still will be winter in Australia and the rest of the Southern Hemisphere.
The heat of competition is expected to dispel the morning and evening chill likely to envelop Sydney over the next 17 days. The question is whether athletes whose performances are seen more and more to be the product of performance-enhancing drugs can, as Olympic officials hope, dispel the cold truth that Olympic ideals have been badly compromised by the behavior of those entrusted to guard them.
International Olympic Committee Vice President Anita DeFrantz of Los Angeles used the title of a movie to describe her mood as the start of the Sydney Games approached: “I’m waiting to exhale.”
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“The Olympics are bulletproof, but the IOC is not,” said 1968 three-time Olympic skiing champion Jean-Claude Killy of France, an IOC member.
Record advertising revenues for NBC’s 2000 Olympic telecasts and renewals of four-year sponsorship deals by 10 of the 11 primary Olympic sponsors suggest the corporate world has forgotten the bid-city corruption scandal in which nearly one-third of the IOC’s members were implicated.
“The danger is if the athletes lose faith,” said IOC executive board member Jacques Rogge of Belgium, favored to replace outgoing IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch next year. “They have not lost faith, and it is up to us to make sure the Games are OK.
“But the athletes have their share of the responsibility. Who is cheating [with drugs]? The athletes, not the officials.”
About 10,500 athletes from 200 nations will compete in the Sydney Games. Among them are four from devastated East Timor, whose sovereignty is so recent they have been allowed into the competition as “Independent Olympic Athletes.”
In the opening ceremony, the East Timorese will march behind the Olympic flag and enter the stadium just ahead of Australia, whose government and Olympic officials were instrumental in assuring East Timor’s participation.
There will be a symbolically significant pairing of North and South Korea, divided by politics since 1945 and by war from 1950 to 1953. They will march together behind a sign that says “Korea,” and a unification flag. For the many Korean families torn apart by the impenetrable border between the countries, this will be a moment of intense emotion.
“When the opening ceremony comes, you try to distinguish who is North Korean and who is South Korean,” said Ryu Song-il, general secretary of North Korea’s Olympic Committee. “You can’t. That’s why Korea is one.”
Samaranch’s brokering of the Korea deal is about the only move the IOC has made in recent months that has escaped criticism. He and the IOC have been under heavy fire for failure to prevent unethical behavior by members, half-hearted efforts at reform and compromise in the fight against increasingly sophisticated doping.
“The IOC decided it was not a drug problem but a public relations problem,” said 1972 Olympic marathon champion Frank Shorter of the United States. “Seen through that prism, everything they have done–and haven’t done–makes sense. They have been testing for drugs no one is taking.”
Shorter is chairman of the new U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, one of the bodies created in an attempt to make doping control independent of Olympic organizations. That independence is supposed to end the feeling that the IOC, the individual federations that govern international sport and their corporate sponsors would prefer to preserve a false image of fairness by covering up doping rather than risk the scandal of numerous positive tests.
That posture has fueled cynicism. “When I was an athlete at Olympic level, unexpected performances were applauded,” said Dr. Arne Ljungqvist of Sweden, a member of the IOC medical commission. “Now they are cast under suspicion. That is a disaster for competitive sport.”
China, long accused of widespread doping, has reacted to the threat of being caught by a new, if flawed, test for the endurance-enhancing drug EPO by withdrawing 27 of its athletes whose domestic doping controls were positive. Skepticism has greeted the individual withdrawals of several athletes from Western nations because of stated injury or illness.
“If there were endless positives here, that would mean the system is working,” said 1964 Olympic swimming champion Donna DeVarona of the United States. “We may have to go through tough times to get to the good times.”
DeVarona, a tireless advocate for women in sports, was honored for that work Sunday when she received the IOC’s Olympic Order. Her greater reward is an Olympics with more women competitors than ever, including new gender equity in water polo, weightlifting and modern pentathlon. About 42 percent of the Sydney competitors are women.
A woman, sprinter-long jumper Marion Jones of the United States, is expected to be the biggest international star of these Games. Jones is trying to become the first athlete to win five gold medals in track and field at one Olympics.
Outdoor athletes may well be affected by the vagaries of the weather during the second Olympics to be held in the Southern Hemisphere. The first, in Melbourne, Australia, in 1956, took place in a warmer time period (Nov. 22-Dec. 8) because the needs of U.S. television were not an issue back then. NBC, which paid the IOC $793 million for U.S. broadcast rights, wanted the Olympics in September to promote its fall entertainment programming.
Sydney in September usually is cool and windy and often rainy. Winds already have stopped yachting and rowing practices, while beach volleyball players and archers have complained about balls and arrows being buffeted in the breeze.
Swirling winds at Olympic Stadium could turn some of the track and field events into a lottery: One long jumper may benefit from a tailwind, and the next could be impeded by a headwind. Records, but not placements, are invalidated by excessive tailwinds.
Although natural phenomena could spoil parts of the competition, the unnatural effect of performance-enhancing drugs threatens to undermine the whole enterprise.
“The reason the Olympics do survive is for some reason humanity wants a place where they feel everything is fair,” Shorter said. “That desire creates a certain denial you have to get over.
“For a long while that denial was based on the idea, `It’s not everyone taking drugs, it’s just a few.’ Now people are saying, `It’s 20 percent or 90 percent,’ so that denial is set aside. The Olympics could turn into a freak show.”
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