A Brilliantly Organised Waste of Effort

When I was a small boy, aged ten or eleven, I watched the Olympic flame held aloft by a runner passing through the town of Amalfi on its way to Rome, where the Olympics were to be held. I like to think that those were more innocent days, but I am not sure that in underlying reality they were.

In those days, the Press sisters, Tamara and Irina, Soviet athletes, set many Olympic and world records, but there were persistent rumours that they were not really women at all, and certainly they retired from international athletics once more rigorous sex testing was introduced. This might be a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc, but however much one bears this possibility in mind, one has difficulty in believing it. The fact is that our lizard brains are pre-set to favour the most uncharitable interpretations.

No doubt it was with the Press sisters in mind that the now-defunct British humorous magazine, Punch, published a cartoon in the run-up to the 1980 Moscow Olympics. It was about Soviet sex-testing for athletes. A female athlete was put in front of a tractor and told that any real woman could change its tyre in less than five minutes.

The other thing about the Moscow Olympics that I remember was an anecdote in the late Christopher Booker’s book about them. The sports correspondent of one of Britain’s less intellectual daily newspapers, he was interested only in sport and knew little of politics in general and of Soviet politics in particular. He took one look around Moscow Airport and said, “This can’t last.”

This was not the common view at the time, when it appeared to the most deeply learned students of the Soviet system, who had spent years or decades studying it, that it was as set in granite and would last forever, insofar as anything in history lasts forever. The recollection of this anecdote taught me an important lesson: that we should neither despise nor worship expertise in itself, and that wisdom about a subject, in the sense of an overall grasp of it, is not necessarily proportional to knowledge about it.

Moscow Airport has a special place in my memory because of my meeting there with Professor Norman Sartorius, who at the time was head of the World Health Organisation’s psychiatric division. We were booked on the same British Airways flight to London, but the plane from London was diverted because of a blizzard.

Professor Sartorius, who was then a Yugoslav, now a Croatian, was obviously a man of great brilliance. He radiated it somehow, but modestly, and completely without arrogance.

We were stranded for a time with no information as to what was going to be done with us. We were hungry, and I went in search of food for us both, not a search in Moscow Airport at that epoch that was guaranteed to be crowned with success. Eventually I returned with all I could find, a tin of sardines and a packet of Mozambican cashew nuts. We set to with gusto; I was impressed that Professor Sartorius, who must surely by then in his life have been accustomed to the highest of haute cuisine, made no fuss.

“The Partisans had a saying during the war,” he told me. “What you’ve eaten, they can’t take away from you.”

We had to share a room overnight in an hotel. No easier or more agreeable companion could have been found. In the morning, we were told that we were to be flown to Helsinki on a Finnish aircraft, and from thence to London.

“Hence the expression,” said Professor Sartorius, “to vanish into Finnair.”

I think this was the best pun that I have ever heard: and English was the professor’s nth language!

But to return to reflections on the Olympics. I had fondly supposed that in the days when athletes could still be genuinely amateur, goodwill and good-fellowship prevailed among them and in the games in general. But then I read an account, by Charles Maurras, the French nationalist who attended them and was later to be tried as a traitor for his support of Pétain during the Occupation, of the first modern Olympics, held in Athens in 1896. It seems that nationalist feeling was both reflected and inflamed by them from the first: my fond supposition was nothing more than wishful thinking.

It is hardly news that totalitarian regimes have used the Games to prove their superiority to supposedly lesser, decadent regimes.

Hitler, who was something of a runt himself, wanted to prove the inherent superiority of the Aryan race by the number of medals it won, polished to perfection as it had been by National Socialist arrangements. The methods used by the Soviets, the East Germans and the Romanians to raise up champions who would thereby establish the superiority of socialism over capitalism do not need elaboration.

Still, national pride seems much in evidence even now, as if the throw by a fellow-national of a discus further than anyone else were, and should be, enough to swell the heart of every patriotic citizen. I saw with alarm that the Ambani brothers, India’s richest family, want to “invest” in training up champions, though the glory of India hitherto has been that it has successfully ignored the Olympic frenzy, and has won a minuscule number of medals proportionate to its population. Bravo, India! I should be very sad if it went back on its glorious record of indifference to the Games.

The present Games in Paris, continuing as I write this, have aroused differing emotions among the people whom I know. My brother-in-law, for example, who has attended some of the events, tells me that they are wonderfully well-organised and that Paris, free of traffic and la racaille (the scum), who have been removed from the streets pro tem, has never looked more beautiful. There are fifty thousand volunteers, ready to come to the assistance of anyone who looks lost, to guide them helpfully in the right direction; everyone feels safe because there are also fifty thousand security officials—gendarmes, police, soldiers—guarding the entry into Paris, and ensuring that the bearded ones or their acolytes plant no bombs. Drones drone overhead, ready to shoot down alien drones. Everyone is well-behaved and joyful; no one leaves litter behind him. It is a kind of authoritarian paradise, where no repression is necessary.

In provincial France, and among Parisians inconvenienced by the restrictions on their movement (some of them can’t return home without passes), the feeling is slightly different. The cost of this festival is unknown; it will never be known, but it is suspected to be large and will fall on taxpayers. It hasn’t benefited even the hoteliers and restaurateurs of Paris, let alone the rest of the country. On the contrary, it has contributed to a decline in receipts from tourism. And it has come in the midst of the greatest political crisis—held in abeyance for the duration of the Games—of recent decades. It is a mark of the frivolity of the governing class, and of its separation from the rest of the population.

These two views are not strictly contradictory: the Games were both brilliantly well-organised and a colossal waste of effort. It was a Frenchman, the Marquis de Custine, in his book Russia in 1839, who remarked that tyrannies call forth great sacrifices to produce trifles—in the Russian case in 1839, spick-and-span military parades for the Tsar to review. Of course, it doesn’t follow in logic that because tyrannies produce trifles that trifles are produced by tyranny: there are other methods of producing them. Nevertheless, many of the people in France to whom I have spoken feel that the Games were imposed on them, and they do not seem to me quite as enthused by the success of French athletes as the newspapers and broadcast media generally suggest.

After the Games are over, normal service will be resumed: normal in this context meaning political conflict in a National Assembly in which there is no possible majority but which must agree to the choice of a Prime Minister who must form a government—that is likely to fall as soon as it is chosen.

The Games in Paris offered us a vision for two weeks of a world without politics, as Engels envisaged: the government of persons replaced by the administration of things, with the resultant atrophy of the state. It cannot alas—or thank goodness—last.

Under his pen-name Theodore Dalrymple, Anthony Daniels recently wrote The Wheelchair and Other Stories and These Spindrift Pages, a collection of literary observations and reflections (both published by Mirabeau).