Olympic Proportions

I suppose it's inevitable that I'll be writing something about the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, but what really is there to write?  That once again the biannual spectacle is making a global ass of itself and all its participants and spectators as well as the host city/nation?  The news certainly isn't all good.  An entire favela (slum) in Rio was leveled to make way for the Olympic village for housing athletes.  Instead of being repurposed afterward as low-income housing as they did in London in 2012 it will be transformed into an elite gated community for the uber-rich.  In other news, two coaches were mugged on the first night in Ipanema, athletes have been publicly swarmed and robbed and there is absolutely no hope that Brazil is going to magically transform itself into an equal and just society.

When I hear about Rio I think of course of what it was like here in Vancouver where the 2010 Winter Olympics were hosted.  Vancouver and Rio have not a lot in common, yet.  Vancouver does have its share of poor and homeless residents, and the population of disenfranchised people here is growing exponentially as this city becomes increasingly unaffordable to all but the obscenely wealthy.  We do not have anything quite like the Favelas although the horrid conditions of the surviving SRO's of our Downtown Eastside are not fit for human habitation, and almost none of the fancy new buildings and towers going up are going to people on low incomes.  We are on our way to becoming Rio.  Rio North.

Our own Olympic Village was also repurposed as housing...for the upper middle class (one bedroom units starting at $1660 a month, and what a storm was launched when our city council had the colossal gall to call that affordable) with maybe the two most modest and worst-placed buildings designated for people on low incomes.

I did have a conversation with a couple of people in the waiting room of the hospital lab.  We all agreed that this business of building bigger muscles by athletes on steroids and injections is nuts and that really its quality instead of quantity, or, less is more.  Also all this nonsense and fuss about medals and winning.  Really, should anyone in our hyper-competitive culture care about winning when really it should be considered such a grand pleasure and huge privilege to actually be there?  Or, to paraphrase Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose prose I find otherwise boring, don't cry because it's over, but smile because it happened.  I do find it intriguing how every year the Olympic athletes appear to be growing yet bigger and bigger muscles and of course it does beg a question or two about clandestine doping and steroid use.  One such athlete, in American garb and unnaturally bulging biceps had this really ugly, aggressive expression, like a UFC fighter.  Likely a Trump supporter.

In conclusion I am always somewhat saddened by all the fuss, praise and adulation that is poured upon these young athletes for their physical prowess.  This is at once primal and very shallow.  But this is why I quickly lose interest in sports and athletics.  They're all about the body but suggest very little or nothing about what it really means to be a good, kind, humble and generous human being.