As the Olympic Games prepare to return to the city of Pierre de Coubertin, visionaries of our time are preparing an “Improved Games” that will reverse its motto: the important thing is not to participate, it is to win.
Is the world of sport ready for competitions where doping and the quest for victory and enrichment at all costs are not only permitted, but encouraged?
If so, it’s not just sports, because this portrait resembles what the political game has become in the United States.
Cranked athletes
As athletes prepare to compete in Paris “for the glory of sport and the honor of their teams”, billionaire libertarian investors are preparing “Improved Games”, where athletes will be promised millions to break world records. world, without doping control.
Cynics will say that there has always been doping in sport and that amateurism is outdated, so why not let athletes do as they please?
This is the reasoning used by the promoters of Enhanced Games. In addition to rehabilitating the champions who were caught, like Ben Johnson or Lance Armstrong, they cynically cast suspicion on everyone else, who must inevitably be hiding something.
According to them, the Olympic movement and sports federations are corrupt and have long abandoned the ideals of sport. Unfortunately, there is a grain of truth there which gives a veneer of legitimacy to the company.
Will the public be attracted to the spectacle of deformed athletes who compromise their health in the name of victory and profit at all costs? We’ll see.
A metaphor?
As an aging athlete, I am acutely aware of the limits of the human body and understand that we may want to push them. But I value it even more fair play and respect for the rules without which my sport would become a soulless shambles.
So I will not follow a freak show where the athletes are gladiators and guinea pigs. With any luck, these new games will fade into obscurity like the defunct X-Games.
However, it is difficult not to see it as a metaphor for the political game in the age of Trump. Indeed, in the Trumpian vision, the imperfections of democratic institutions become an excuse for systematic corruption, victory justifies lying and cheating and, of course, anything goes in the quest for profit.
Donald Trump justifies his lies and corruption by claiming that politicians have always done this. Like the cynics who claim that it is impossible to play high-level sport within the rules, Trump and his lawyers will argue next Thursday before the Supreme Court that it is impossible to be president of the United States without having carte blanche to break the laws.
It is no coincidence that one of the main proponents of “Improved Games” is Peter Thiele, a multi-billionaire libertarian who fully supports Donald Trump’s crusade to remake America in his image. The cynicism he feels towards the ideals of sport is matched only by that he feels towards the democratic ideal.
