{"id":2371,"date":"2016-08-09T12:40:37","date_gmt":"2016-08-09T10:40:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/?p=2371"},"modified":"2016-08-09T15:57:07","modified_gmt":"2016-08-09T13:57:07","slug":"refugees-and-the-absence-of-fun-make-for-olympian-sadness-with-a-hint-of-anger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/refugees-and-the-absence-of-fun-make-for-olympian-sadness-with-a-hint-of-anger\/","title":{"rendered":"Refugees and the absence of fun make for Olympian sadness, with a hint of anger"},"content":{"rendered":"

As we near the end of the first week of that biennial orgy of corporate delight known b(u)y many as the Olympic Games I\u2019m left wondering, as so often happens around this time, about how it seems to go so wrong. It may be my over-reliance on a specific international group of socially networked, like-minded people, but so far I have seen agonising hard work and seriousness, broken bones, homophobic abuse and dullards-cum-sexists<\/a> in media commentary, thuggery and contempt shored up by pseudo-science<\/a> directed at Caster Semenya (yet close-to-silence about Dutee Chand \u2013 perhaps because she won her case at the CAS, or perhaps the \u2018well-informed\u2019 commentariat doesn\u2019t recognise her or thinks their audiences won\u2019t), some spectacular failures (the names Williams and Djokovic come to mind) and moments of absurdity<\/a> in image\/brand self-defence.<\/p>\n

There has been some lightness, such as the picture of the really (I mean REALLY) bored looking lifeguard at the pool<\/a>. There has also been the occasional moment of delight \u2013 consider Ibtihaj Muhammad<\/a> stepping out in a US uniform complete with hijab and Majlinda Kelmendi<\/a> winning Kosovo\u2019s first Olympic gold medal, or those Brazilians who manage to smuggle their anti-government #Fora Temer<\/a> signs into events (including written on athlete hands during the opening ceremony). This is just inside the venues:\"tear<\/a> outside I\u2019m seeing the expected discontent, street protests, over-reaction by one of the world\u2019s most militarised police forces and citizen fury all made more poignant by the empty seats at venues, absence of top flight male golfers and athletes in and on dangerously polluted waters.<\/p>\n

Amid all of this, though, I\u2019m struck by an overwhelming sense of sadness about these games, prompted principally by two things. The first is the Refugee Olympic Team (ROT)<\/a>. Don\u2019t get me wrong: I love it that ROT exists \u2013 that is, I love that stateless high performance athletes have been able to achieve their \u2018Olympic Dream\u2019. I\u2019m more than a little in awe that many of them, given their back stories<\/a> and the turmoil in their home countries that made them stateless, have been achieve those personal goals. So why the sadness?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m saddened (with a garnish of anger) that there is all manner of delight over and praise for ROT from people and media outlets who seem in every other way to hate refugees, who seem to go out of their way to ensure that these displaced people remain consigned to the margins of existence in tents or ramshackle buildings in inhospitable environments, unable to legally work or relegated to sending their kids out to work illegally because the authorities turn a blind eye to kids working and families need incomes. Then, to top it off, it\u2019s the power \u00e9lite of the IOC, allied to the global \u00e9lite of major states and drawn from the same class group as make up the leaders of those states, who\u2019ve allowed the ROT to participate and now seem to be patting themselves on the back for the humanitarianism over an avoidable situation that is the direct result of the actions of many of those powerful states (the USA, UK and other EU members, Russia, China and the like). This is where the anger comes in: that same humanitarian spirit seems to have been absent when this power \u00e9lite was engineering a global political environment that made those athletes into refugees, and is ignoring the environmental and climate crisis that will make millions more. Much as I love the ROT, it exists only because the global \u00e9lite have opted to apply a smug band-aid to a gaping wound on the carcass of humanity.<\/p>\n

The second cause of my sadness is Usain Bolt, or rather that only Usain Bolt seems to be allowed to have fun. Again, don\u2019t get me wrong \u2013 it is great that Bolt so obviously enjoys himself. It\u2019s even better that Bolt seems to undermine the ideology of Citius Altius Fortius<\/em>\u00a0when he eases off the speed when it is clear he\u2019s going to win, much to the chagrin of some sports journalists. It\u2019s the overall lack of fun (and the slightly disapproving tone of these comments on it \u2013 remember Croatian high jumper Blanka Vlasic who also obviously enjoyed herself and the snide, highly sexualised mediation of her image) that bundles up many of the things that the IOC and their corporate festival get wrong. Those athletes who are left may have their \u2018fun\u2019 at the closing ceremony, but until then it is all grim grind and tight sphincters on their way to not making the semi-final.<\/p>\n

Unlike most Games since 2000, there has been precious little rhetoric of \u2018legacy\u2019 in Rio (or it might all have been in Portuguese so I didn\u2019t hear it, or that the legacy is a blatant rather than slightly discrete transfer of wealth and resources to private hands\/pockets), but there is always the quieter discourse of the athlete as role model, as inspiration; of the hope that golden gains in the Games will bring participation gains at home; of the need to secure those victories at home and away in order to keep that funding stream flowing. So, even when we don\u2019t talk of \u2018legacy\u2019, in the UK at least it has become always already present as we look not only for the new Tom Daley or Laura Trott, but also for that expected growth in post-Olympic participation numbers to be more than a spike.<\/p>\n

Yet even the most serious of athletes talk of enjoyment (perhaps not fun) in their sport, although it may be wrapped up in the language of the \u2018euphoria of the endorphin rush\u2019. We also know that kids stay involved in their sport because they enjoy themselves, often despite the best efforts of their Physical Education teachers or coaches. Increasingly, where it still exists and the playing fields have not been hocked off for a new identikit housing estate or server farm, PE and school sport is regulated by a dully instrumentalist curriculum, and despite the efforts of many PE has remained the purview of the modern inheritors of the spirit of the Games Master: all ball games, clip boards, whistles and blokishness. Despite PE teacher\u2019s training, many of their intentions and some of their actions, the British education system seems intent on reproducing Kes<\/em>-lite<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We know, because if we look closely we can see it, that athletes find those tiny gaps in the dominant order of sport where they can have fun, where the rules don\u2019t quite reach, where pleasure and enjoyment can be enacted and where the discipline of achievement can be quietly avoided or for some subverted (Imara Felkers, Ellen Mulder and I<\/a> have recently explored this in an essay in Philosophical Perspectives on Play<\/em><\/a>\u00a0that Wendy Russell, Emily Ryall and I edited). We also know that kids find fun where we don\u2019t expect it, or more importantly where we don\u2019t plan for them to find it. Ian Wellard in his recent Sport, Fun and Enjoyment<\/em><\/a>\u00a0presents compelling evidence that \u2018fun\u2019 includes doing new things, being part of a group of peers trying out the unexpected or just getting out of the class room and away from the regular disciplines of PE. These spaces of fun are both absent from how we are shown and encouraged to see these Games.<\/p>\n

Strangely, however, we have a view of a \u2018participation legacy\u2019 where we seem to think that kids will be inspired to take up something new by a brow-beaten, humourless athlete who appears to be worn down by the relentless grind of staying part of the global sporting \u00e9lite. What\u2019s more, if kids do get inspired we seem to think that they\u2019ll stay involved in something new of we keep treating them like those athletes \u2013 destined for glory\u2026. or that \u2018fun\u2019 happens in club activities not in the playing arena. All the while, only one freakishly tall, freakishly fast Jamaican is allowed to be seen to have fun and enjoy himself while doing his Olympic sport.<\/p>\n

The self-congratulatory attitude about the ROT is cynicism at its worst, where the athletes are exploited to humanise and redeem corporate goals. My sadness\/anger is because those athletes cannot even keep\u00a0their success for themselves or for the millions of others dispossessed like them: it is stolen from them by those who are in large part responsible for their dispossession. The absence of fun shows not the cynicism of the \u00e9lite but their stupidity where the claims to legacy and inspiration have been shown to be utterly false and yet nothing changes, the IOC and its national allies\/agents keep doing the same old thing in the same sports model: isn\u2019t keeping doing the same failing thing while expecting different results a sign of madness? Unless, of course if the real goal isn\u2019t to stimulate participation but to encourage us to use our small plastic rectangle to buy more sports shoes, high fat salty fast food or brown carbonated sugar drinks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As we near the end of the first week of that biennial orgy of corporate delight known b(u)y many as the Olympic Games I\u2019m left wondering, as so often happens around this time, about how it seems to go so wrong. It may be my over-reliance on a specific international group of socially networked, like-minded […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":2381,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2371","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-okategoriserade"},"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/teargascans.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2JbBl-Cf","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2371\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}