If the media is the message, what is the Olympic PR machine trying to tell us? Perhaps this.
If since the age of 6 all you ever do during your waking hours is eating, sleeping and swimming, whilst devouring industrial amounts of pasta, pizza and ham sandwiches on white bread with mayonnaise that amount to a whopping 12,000 calories a day, some day you will be just able to say, ‘It’s, like, cool, I mean, like, totally cool’ when you’ve won 10 gold medals in a row.
When Pierre de Coubertin set about laying the foundation of the modern Olympic movement in the late 19th century he was inspired by the ideals of Classical Greece and sports education in Anglo-Saxon colleges. Ancient Olympians - as well as US and British boarding school graduates - were gentlemen of the leisure class who on top of sportive also combined scientific and political pursuits. Coubertin became enamoured with the idea of exclusivity probably never envisaging that a century later there will crop up a a tiny specialised über-race of physical hyper-achievers giving the vicarious kicks of exercise excellence to misnourished masses plomped with a 6-pack and potato chips in front of their TVs.
No comments:
Post a Comment