The Olympic Games begin today in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Games are no more purveyors of unalloyed delight to sportsmen and their fans. The quadrennial modern Olympics come with a big price tag, and the benefits of holding them aren’t readily apparent to the host city or nation any more. Nevertheless, they are still the world’s most glittering sporting event, where athletes gather, hoping to live up to the motto of Citius, Altius, Fortius (faster, higher, stronger). There is no truer spectacle than sportspeople pushing themselves and the winners celebrating success on the podium to the tune of their national anthems.
The Rio Games is keenly awaited for the wondrous possibility of the world’s greatest ever sprinter, Jamaica’s Usain Bolt, completing a sprint triple hat-trick of triumphs to prove he’s still the fastest human. Modern sport is so mixed up with political, economic and humanitarian issues that Baron de Coubertin’s pristine imagery hardly applies any more. The Rio Games are a microcosm of the 21st century, with its myriad problems. The Brazilian police, for instance, battled drug addicts as the Olympic torch passed through Alemao slum and then took on anti-government protesters. Brazil is in a state of ferment as it undergoes its worst recession seven years after bidding successfully for these Games when its economy was booming. A palace coup dethroned Dilma Rousseff as President some time back, while locals face regular Games-hosting displacement problems (with 70,000 affected, as opposed to around two million in Beijing), traffic jams and fears over the cost of the Games. The initial $9 billion estimate is likely to be dwarfed by reality. And then there is the dreaded Zika virus.
The XXXI Olympiad has suffered even more from global geopolitics as Russian athletes were disgraced for decades-long state-sponsored programmes of systematic doping and their other sportsmen allowed participation only depending on their individual drug-testing history. But all nations still believe in funding elite programmes to satisfy a national yearning for medals. India has tried to catch up with the rest of the world in the medal hunt, sending a record number of athletes to Rio, not without a tinge of controversy either thanks to the unseemly Narsingh doping conspiracy. What today’s athletes also need is the ability to stay focused despite the problems of accommodation not being up to scratch in terms of standards set in the modern era of Olympics and sporting arenas not 100 per cent ready. The demands for medals in a sports-conscious nation can be heavy, and it’s time for one the world’s tortoises in sporting excellence on the track and field to spur its sportspeople to deliver.
