The urge overcomes everyone.
You spend an hour walking slowly through the ruins of the temples that made ancient Olympia as much a sanctuary as a sporting venue, and finally you pass through the remains of the vaulted tunnel that led to the sports site of the Olympic Games.
Or Game, as we soon shall see.
Set between two sloping, shallow hillsides is a rectangular playing area that looks more like an elongated soccer field than anything else. At each end is a line of stone blocks, placed where tiles had marked start and finish lines.
Any tourist who stands at the near set of blocks is compelled by the spirit of the place to run to the far set. Women in high heels or sandals, men in dress shoes, kids in sneakers–they all run, jog or wobble across the packed dirt, covering a distance of 600 ancient feet. Hercules’ feet, as the legend goes.
The distance actually is 192.25 meters, about 617 modern feet. Those who run it are re-creating the entire sports program of the first recorded Olympics, in 776 B.C. It remained the entire sports program for the next 13 Olympiads, the four-year period between what became a Pan Hellenic festival of sport, the arts and religion. The winner of the footrace, called the Stadion, was so revered that each of the ancient Olympiads bore his name.
The modern Olympics come to Olympia on Aug. 18, when the men’s and women’s shot put competitions will take place on the site of the ancient footrace.
Elsewhere in Greece, but mainly in Athens, there will be 298 other events in the Games of the 28th modern Olympiad.
It took 52 years for the ancient Games to grow from one to two events and 68 years to add a non-running event.
In the last 52 years, the modern Games also have doubled in size. The difference is that size now is a gargantuan 300 events, a program with an organizational scope even Hercules would be hard-pressed to measure.
The Greeks have vowed that returning the Olympics to their ancient and modern roots would revive the humanistic spirit with which they once apparently were imbued. Yet they are charged with staging an event so unmanageable that philosophy gets buried under the rubble of all the construction for the 35 venues needed to stage events in 28 sports and 37 sports disciplines.
For a decade, the International Olympic Committee’s leaders have vowed to curtail the excess–if not the excesses–of the Summer Games. Each time they have backtracked, unwilling to offend the interests of one sport for the greater good of all.
Jacques Rogge, the current IOC president, is the latest Quixote to star in this ongoing farce. Rogge has set an absolute limit of 300 events and 10,500 athletes, still absolutely ridiculous. The Olympic Games would be so much more with so much less.
What the IOC won’t do, we will: wield an ax to an unwieldy program.
The philosophy will be simple:
1. No more sports, or events within sports, that appeal to or are dominated by only a few of the 202 nations coming to the 2004 Olympics.
2. No more sports for which the Olympics aren’t the most important competition.
There will be some complications, of course. One comes from trying to look at the cuts with a global perspective, rather than follow the perilous road of assuming everyone shares the view from the United States. To nearly every other nation in the world, the Olympics are far more important, athletically, historically, culturally, politically and psychologically, than they are to the United States.
Here we go.
Watch out for bruised egos, because some of the cuts still are painfully arbitrary.
Team sports first, since they add the largest number of athletes to the total.
So say goodbye to baseball. Only eight countries care about it, and stadiums cost too much. Sorry, softball, but you go for the same reason, later if not sooner. After three Olympics, only 12 countries (including Greece, which is filling its team with foreigners) will have been good enough for the 24 Olympic spots in softball.
And so long to men’s basketball. While the 1992 Dream Team was critical to the game’s worldwide spread, that job is done: There were 73 foreigners in the NBA last year. Adios, men’s soccer. In the most global of sports, the World Cup is the only thing that matters. (Women’s soccer stays until its World Cup gains more stature.)
Field hockey gets a reprieve because of its importance to the Indian subcontinent. India (population 1.1 billion) and Pakistan (147 million) have won 17 of their 26 Olympic medals in the sport.
Individual sports now.
No more tennis. Steffi Graf gets credit for a “Golden Slam” when she won the Olympics and all four Grand Slams in 1988, but the Olympics otherwise are a footnote in the sport. The oxymoron sport, modern pentathlon, is out. There is nothing modern about it, and only 19 countries had men in the 2000 Olympics.
See ya, synchronized swimming. Any sport where hair gel is the critical element has to go. Bye, bye, boxing. Constant judging scandals make it a farce. Exit, equestrian. Too elite, too expensive, too much depends on the quality of the animal. Ta, ta, taekwondo. The sport is too connected to the alleged improprieties of disgraced IOC member Kim Un Yong of South Korea. (The other martial art, judo, stays because of what it means to Japan.)
Some individual sports need to trim events: rowing, sailing, canoe-kayak, diving and gymnastics.
Rowing is a noble sport, but it never will spread in a meaningful sense because of expense. Of 615 medals awarded over its modern Olympic history, none have gone to Africa, four to Asia (all China) and just eight to South America (four each to Argentina and Uruguay). Some of its 15 events can be cut, especially because even the traditional breadth of power in Europe will shrink with the end of state-sponsored teams from the old Soviet Bloc.
Sailing has limitations similar to rowing: an expensive, Euro-dominated sport, with the exception of windsurfing (the Mistral Class). Five of its other eight events should go.
The demise of the Soviet Bloc also affects the quality of canoe-kayak, in which no Asian or African country ever has won a medal. Yet it has 12 flat water events, many repetitious, half of which could go. Since rowing and canoe-kayak require an expensive venue (and another venue for canoe-kayak slalom) with little local after-use, maybe both (and at least slalom) should disappear entirely.
Synchronized diving is silly, and trampoline adds nothing to gymnastics. Au revoir.
These cuts will reduce the Summer Games by about one-third, to the size of the 1980 Moscow Olympics.
Back to the future is the only way to go, especially if that future ever is to include an Olympics in Africa or South America, where few cities could handle the demands of the current program.
The footrace in ancient Olympia went the opposite way from the one tourists run. A different direction worked 2,780 years ago. It is what the Olympics must try again.
