Philadelphia

IN 1894, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, having refused the military and political careers typical of a French aristocrat, settled upon the revival of the Olympic Games as his life’s work. He saw sport as a higher calling, a religion. And he saw the Olympics as an event that would enhance and heighten moral virtue: “May joy and good fellowship reign, and in this manner, may the Olympic torch pursue its way through ages, increasing friendly understanding among nations, for the good of a humanity always more enthusiastic, more courageous and more pure.”

He is considered by many the father of the modern Games, first held in 1896 in Athens. But if he were alive today and witness to the Olympics over the past 40 years, he would almost surely come to the conclusion that his grand idea had failed, that idealism is no match for the troika of politics, money and sports.

The Summer Games in Beijing are four months away and already a predictable mess. The running of the Olympic torch resulted in arrests and nasty confrontations with the police last week in London and Paris amid protests against China’s recent crackdown in Tibet and other human rights abuses. In San Francisco, the only North American stop, the torch-bearers played literal hide-and-seek with protesters when the route was suddenly changed for security reasons. There have been repeated calls for heads of state to boycott the opening ceremonies. But protests and boycotts are no longer effective remedies.

There is only one way left to improve the Olympics: to permanently end them.

True, in the world of sports, any plan that puts morality over money is unlikely to happen. Commissions are formed only once the problem is over (see Major League Baseball) and the cheaters will always find another angle  you can bet that some lab somewhere is working on the design of a new steroid undetectable to testing (see every professional sport and many “amateur” ones). The loftier the rose-colored rhetoric, which in the Olympics has become an Olympian growth industry, the worse the underlying stink. And this is an institution that is rotted in so many different ways.