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By BEN MCCARTY
News staff writer
August 9, 2008
By this time the Olympic flame should be sputtering to life
amidst the smog-stained skies of Beijing, China.
Four years ago when the summer games closed in Athens the world
hoped that putting the games in China would bring about sweeping
reforms and open up the country.
And as the world has seen in the four years since, with
increased crackdown on dissenters, continued oppression in
Tibet, and attempts to squash any negative publicity for a
massive earthquake in May and limitations on foreign media
arriving to cover the games, the opposite has happened.
Yet the Olympic flame is burning.
Through the Nazis’ best propaganda efforts in 1936, the massacre
of demonstrating Mexican students weeks before the 1968 Games
opened in Mexico City, the kidnapping and deaths of Israeli
athletes in 1972, dueling boycotts by the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. in
1980 and 1984, a bombing of the 1996 Atlanta Games, corruption
scandals of the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games and numerous
delays and last-minute worries about venues being ready for the
2004 Games, the Olympic flame has continued to burn.
And regardless of what happens over the next two weeks in
Beijing, the flame will continue to burn for generations to
come.
The Olympics are not about the politics of the host country, and
as Germany found out in 1936 and China has found out as the
Olympic torch made its way toward the world’s most populated
nation, the games do not so much highlight a country’s
accomplishments as much as it points out its flaws.
I’ll be watching over the next two weeks, not out of hope that
the policies of the Chinese government are embarrassed on the
world stage — they have already allowed that to happen enough on
their own — but because I want to see my countrymen and several
University of Portland alumni do well.
Ultimately, that is what the Olympics are about. Many of the
athletes have spent nearly their entire lives preparing for this
one moment in the sun. They have one chance to win glory and to
represent their country on a global stage. For those few minutes
that you are competing, the politics go out the window. The only
thing that matters is being the first across the finish line.
Whether it is the best of humanity — or the worst — that is
remembered from the Beijing Olympics in the history books, the
Olympic flame will continue to burn.
As the flame burns over Beijing, Russia and Georgia have just
gone to war, a genocide is being carried out in Darfur, refugees
in Myanmar still do not have a home to return after a
devastating typhoon hit their country in May, and the U.S. is
still involved in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In the ancient Olympiad, when the Olympic flame began to burn,
everything else stopped. Truces were declared in any wars and
all eyes turned to the competitors.
As the flame burns over Beijing for the next several weeks, so
with it also burns the hope that the day can come again where
world can put politics aside and come together as fans to cheer
on the best athletes we have to offer.
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