Odd as it may sound, Olympic competition once included art, and medalists included musicians, painters, and poets. One was Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the 1912 Stockholm Games’ gold medalist in poetry and — by sheer coincidence, surely — also the modern games’ founder.

“O sport,” the nobleman’s winning “Ode to Sport” waxed, “you are beauty,” and “audacity,” and the “pleasure of the gods.”

A century on, the Olympics still embody beauty, but the audacity they now conjure is not what Coubertin had in mind, but a celebration of cheating and a saga of lost innocence — financially, athletically, and politically.

War by other means

Political innocence was lost already by Coubertin himself, who insisted after the 1936 Berlin Games that Adolf Hitler, rather than hijack his vision, had “magnificently served the Olympic ideal.”

Still, the Olympic ideal seemed salvaged when five postwar Olympiads offered the spirit of fraternity the games were meant to inspire, especially when former Axis spearheads Rome and Tokyo hosted the games peacefully and happily.

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In 1968 this era of good feeling came to an end.

What began with Mexican police firing into marching students, and killing at least 25, lest they disturb the approaching Mexico City Games, was followed in 1972 by the massacre in Munich of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian gunmen, and then by three boycotts: Montreal’s by African nations, Moscow’s by much of the West, and Los Angeles’s by the former East Bloc.

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The Greek tradition, of halting all wars while the athletes competed, had thus been turned on its head, as the games became war’s continuation by other means.

Following the Cold War, the Games resurfaced as an instrument of authoritarian assertion, first in Beijing, then in Sochi. Meanwhile, the Games also lost their athletic purity.

The original ideal of amateurism was buried in 1992 when the U.S. was allowed to deploy NBA stars, consequently fielding the Dream Team of multimillionaires Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, and Magic Johnson.

It was a healthy unmasking of the previous era’s hypocrisy, when Communist countries fielded nominal amateurs who were obviously full-time athletes and fully salaried professionals. However, the Dream Team’s emergence was anything but a victory for the Olympic ideal, because it was part of the Games’ takeover by mammon.

The meaning of doping

In 1984 Los Angeles showed that the Olympics can be privately funded, and even profitable, through sales of sponsorships and broadcast rights.

However, having become a major financial junction, the Games now tempted more athletes to dope, and cities to bribe.

Athletes realized that medals meant fat advertising contracts, and thus did the same doping the East Bloc did before them, the only difference being that the communists doped for the collective, and the capitalists for the individual. Consequently, 44 medals were revoked for doping since 1984. Many were just not caught.

Meanwhile, cities craved the treasure the Games have come to produce. Hence the bribery scandals surrounding the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, the 1998 Games in Nagano, Japan, and now the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo.

Finally, the Games that celebrated money and rewarded despots debilitated the weak.

Greece was the first victim of this syndrome. The infrastructure investments its commitment demanded — including a new subway and airport — resulted in massive borrowing that helped trigger one of history’s worst economic crises.

Come Friday, the world will be staring at Greece’s successor.

The monetary costs of the Rio Games are actually a reasonable $4.6 billion, as opposed to the London Games’ $15 billion and the Sochi Games’ astronomic $21.9 billion. Yet Brazil’s aim in assuming this task was not to survive its costs, but to transform its image from a land of social despair, political ineptitude and urban decay to a land of excellence, momentum and hope.

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This aim will be frustrated.

The Rio Games will hopefully run flawlessly, but basic prerequisites for the modernity Brazil wanted to display have not been delivered, from Guanabara Bay, where solid sewage will greet competing sailors, to the state government, which is reaching its supreme test with its cops unpaid and a crucial subway line unfinished.

A petition signed last spring by 150 medical experts to delay or relocate the games lest they accelerate the Zika bug’s global spread, served as a harsh reminder that just when it hoped to display it, Brazil’s modernity remains doubted by too many elsewhere.

The Games are exposing Brazil’s Third Worldliness because it’s too broad, tall, and deep to conceal. The Games’ arrival while the country’s president faces impeachment could hardly be more proverbial. That is also why the original hope, that hosting the Games would speed Brazil’s defeat of the poverty and crime, for which its cities are notorious, was absurd.

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Sending special forces to conquer 38 favela slums from local drug gangs, as Rio did in recent years, is good for cleansing several dozen square miles for the Games’ 16 days. It won’t even dent poverty itself.

Back to the source

All these predicaments lead to one conclusion: that the Olympics should be held permanently in one place.

No, this will not eradicate doping; that will happen when dopers are seen as thieves and jailed, as some law books already demand.

However, holding the Games in one place will discontinue the bidding process that breeds bribery; it will deprive rich countries of the opportunity to taunt their wealth; it will rob despots of the opportunity to masquerade as entertainers; and it will save developing countries the kind of embarrassments that now await Brazil.

As for the permanent host’s identity, it should be a no-brainer: Greece.

Greece already built everything the Games require, and in fact will be able to use its new task to rehabilitate economically, though that national benefit is marginal in what should be a global benefit.

The global benefit, besides tempering the Games’ financial contamination, will be in the political realm, because a permanently Greek Olympics will lift them above the world’s political struggles; just like they did, for two weeks, every four years, for nearly a thousand years, in ancient Greece.