Baron de Coubertin, rolling over in his grave

by David Benjamin

PARIS — It’s time to mothball the Olympics.

Don’t be shocked. This has been done before. The world went without the Games for 1,500 years before Baron de Coubertin inaugurated the modern Olympiad in Athens in 1896.

Today, the impending XXXII Olympiad, Burlesque Show and Sashimi Banquet in Tokyo very likely has Coubertin spinning, with an appropriate measure of athletic grace, in his grave.

The greed, bloat, corruption, drug dependency and viral load that accompany this obsolete spectacle have filled the Japanese with fear and loathing — and the rest of us with a pandemic-induced ennui. Because there is a plague upon the Earth, no one’s allowed into Japan to watch the running, jumping, swimming, diving, surfing and various other high-jinks. Instead, we’ll watch — if there’s nothing better to do — on TVs, phones and laptops a commercially edited abridgment of this wretched excess, interrupted frequently by beer ads, network promos and tearjerking video vignettes of the winners and losers, the hale and the injured, the underdog discus tossers and the millionaire celebrities slumming amongst the outskirt unknowns of Greco-Roman wrestling and scull-paddling.

After this is all over and the financial catastrophe tallied, we should, with all due reverence, euthanize this shambling mega-sport mongrel and — four years from now — try something entirely different. We can call it the first Regular People’s Olympic Games.

The idea came to me the other night when, for nostalgia’s sake, I indulged in probably my 15th or 16th viewing of Hugh Hudson’s film, Chariots of Fire, about two unlikely English heroes, Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell, at the 1924 Olympics in Paris. As I wallowed again vicariously in this true underdog saga, I noted the paucity of events in 1924. There were about 20 sports contested, less than half the number this year. All events were individual, with no multiplayer team sports (no soccer, no basketball, no referees) and no judges deciding on the “artistic expression” of a choreographed snatch of sequined showbiz. It was an Olympics distinguished by its simplicity, clarity and economy.

And fun.

The money-grubbing geezers who run today’s Olympics wouldn’t recognize fun if it barged past the butler and doused them with cheap champagne. We need to fire them all. Nobody will miss them. Nobody even knows who the hell they are!

After we do, and we cancel the 2024 Paris Games, here’s the plan.

This year, the XXXII Olympiad is flying 11,000 superbly conditioned, well-compensated, undetectably enhanced elite jocks and jockettes to Tokyo. Next time around, they all stay home. Most of them, anyhow, have bigger fish to fry and more lucrative trophies to win. Instead, we fly 11,000 randomly chosen (by application and lottery) ordinary, not especially athletic men, women and kids — between, say, the ages of 12 and 60 — somewhere.

A nice normal place, like Bloomington, Illinois or Reykjavik — some town where you’d never expect to hold an Olympics. With this established quota of 11,000 “Olympians,” we could invite 100 people from 110 different countries — a hundred from the U.S.A, a hundred from Germany, but also a hundred from Equatorial Guinea, Lithuania and Tonga.

Once we got all 11,000 to the Olympic motel in Bloomington, they’d need a week or so to get to know one another and decide who’s going to run, say, the 400 meters and who’s best suited to compete in the cannonball competition.

The cannonball, you see, symbolizes the whole thing!

In the Regular People’s Olympics, we couldn’t have a lot of swimming, or diving, or water polo. These are perfectly good sports but most us — let’s face it — can’t swim 200 meters, or dive, or tread water for thirty minutes at a stretch. Half of us would drown trying. So, the only aquatic sport suitable to this Olympics would be Lardass Heaven, a cannonball contest, from the high-dive platform — without judges. The winner would be decided by the biggest, highest splash of the day (and maybe the roar of the crowd).

Imagine winning an Olympic gold medal for being the fattest guy — or girl — in Ireland, or Lichtenstein, and the World! The fans would go wild.

The Regular People’s Olympics would necessarily include a lot of sports that might seem silly — although no sillier than skateboarding, “sport climbing” and synchronized swimming — but they’re games real people can play without risking serious injury or fatal trauma. Bowling, for example.

Try to imagine an organizational meeting of the U.S. Olympic team. There’s punch and shrimp cocktail, chips, dips and beer. After a while, a chairwoman is elected. She peruses the list of sports and says, “Okay, do have any decent bowlers out there?” and one guy shouts out, “Tenpins, duckpins or candlepins?” to which the chairwoman bows to his expertise and replies, “Okay, fella. You’re on the bowling team. Where ya from?”

“Sheboygan,” the bowler responds.

“Figures,” says the chairwoman, which gets a laugh, after which she shouts, “Okay, next, can anybody here shoot an arrow?”

Yes, archery would stay, along with the shorter distances in track and field (but probably no hurdles). Pingpong might survive, and golf (but only the miniature variety), tennis, badminton, rowing, shooting and certain bicycle races. But the real emphasis in the Regular People’s Olympics would be fun-to-watch sports that everybody has played sometime in their lives.

Why, for instance, was there never croquet in the Olympics? And darts! These are ruthless, ferociously fought sports. Not to mention chess (outdoors in the park), checkers, poker, mah-jongg and lots of billiards — eight-ball snooker and bumper pool. The competition in lawn sports — bocce, petanque, cornhole and horseshoes — would be fierce and fascinating. Millions would not only watch. They would identify! “I can do that!” they would yell at the TV. “I could beat that guy!”

You’d still have basketball, but no teams. Instead, one-on-one games up to ten points but you have to win by two (Everybody knows that!), and free-throw competitions — best of ten, best of fifty, best of a hundred in the finals.

There would have to be something involving Frisbees and dogs. Tetherball is one of the great unheralded sports, ideal for the Regular People’s Olympics, along with cutthroat jacks, full-contact hopscotch and various forms of marbles. I picture cameramen clustered ‘round the “marbles court,” focusing on the shooter’s thumb, the muted voice of a play-by-play announcer whispering, “If she clips that aggie with this shot, little Effie Greenbaum can claim Olympic Gold! — at age twelve!”

And how do we end it? What’s our climactic event? It can’t be the marathon, ’cause who among a randomly selected group of 100 — or 11,000 — could survive 26 miles? Besides, marathons are boring for everyone but marathoners.

My choice is this: Each country puts together a team of men, boys, women and girls, old and young — evenly distributed and oft-substituted (everybody plays!) — for a Giant Kickball Tournament, played with one of those textured red, exceedingly bouncy rubber Spalding playground balls. Three days of three-inning battles until 110 teams are down to two and — in a nail-biting six-inning Final — 13-year-old Jamila Singh loops the ball over the infield and Pakistan, shockingly, outkicks Jamaica, 23-22!

The crowd goes wild. The ratings soar. Advertisers sign up in droves. And a select committee is formed to limit eligibility in the next Olympics to countries who have an internationally sanctioned professional kickball league.