RevolutionZ
RevolutionZ
Ep 302 The Olympics Paris and Beyond with Jules Boykoff
Episode 302 of RevolutionZ is titled The Olympics Paris and Beyond. Together, we uncover the complexities of the Olympics including the make-up and power of International Olympic Committee (IOC), who gets the billions generated through broadcasting rights and corporate partnerships, how cities are selected and the often rather horrible effects on them, and much more. We expand our focus to the situation of athletes more broadly, the dynamics of sports and competition per se, and finally on what is underway and possible to alter relations and outcomes for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics and for sports more widely. The Olympics becomes a highly graphic case of corporate commercialization and profit seeking run wild even as it also contains instances of justice, human solidarity, and pursuit of excellence.
Hello, my name is Michael Albert and I'm the host of the podcast that's titled Revolution Z. This is our 302nd consecutive episode and our guest this time is Jules Boykoff with us to talk about the Olympics, paris and beyond. Jules is the author of a new book what Are the Olympics For, and the author of six books in all on the politics of the Olympics. He has written essays on the Olympic Games for many publications and academic journals and maybe two weeks ago now, I guess, zinett reposted a brilliant summary I thought article about the Paris Olympics, which he wrote with Dave Zirin for the Nation. Boykoff is internationally known for his Olympic studies. He lived in England before and during the 2012 London Olympics and was a Fulbright Research Fellow in Brazil before and during the 2016 Olympic Games. He has lectured on the Olympics around the world, from Tokyo to Paris, to Rio de Janeiro, to Los Angeles. He teaches political science at Pacific University in Oregon. So, jules, welcome to Revolution Z.
Speaker 2:Thank you, michael, it's great to be with you.
Speaker 1:The Nation article that was reprinted on Znet maybe a couple of weeks back was like the antithesis of mass media coverage. It gave a human feel, really more than a feel for what occurred, why it occurred and the implications, and I hope we can get to what to do about the Olympics, what it should be like and perhaps the same thing for athletics more broadly, even moving forward. But to start, well, what is the Olympics? Who runs it? Who makes the decisions and, for that matter, who winds up with the bulk of the revenues?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a good place to start, michael, and the group that you really need to understand, if you want to understand the way the Olympics happened in the 21st century, is the International Olympic Committee.
Speaker 2:This is a group of people that are based in Lausanne, switzerland. They're a nonprofit organization that is tremendously profitable. During the cycle ahead of and including the Tokyo Olympics, they brought in some $7.6 billion in revenues. Much of their revenues come from TV broadcasters like NBC here in the United States, but also from corporate sponsors of the Olympics Alibaba, panasonic, big name corporations that fork over tens of millions of dollars to be associated with the Olympic brand. And they decide who is going to host the Olympics. They chose Paris for the 2024 Games, they chose Los Angeles to host the Summer Olympics in 2028. And they'll continue to do that, moving forward. This is a group of people who I think is fair to characterize as a privileged sliver of the global 1%. A striking number of them are literal royalty, you know, princesses from Liechtenstein, sheikhs from around the world, and these people spend their spare time running the Olympic Games. And so if you really want to stay in the Olympics, the IOC, as they're known, the International Olympic Committee is a good place to start.
Speaker 1:Are these people in it? Because they love sports?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a mixture of people who get onto the International Olympic Committee. Michael, if you want to join, here's what you got to do. You need to start sucking up the people who are already on the International Olympic Committee because they co-opt their friends and their own members, which of course breeds a certain type of person that joins the International Olympic Committee. Now they've broadened their circles. Recently they brought on a celebrity actor, michelle Yeoh, for example. Paul Gasol, the former basketball player, is also a member of the International Olympic Committee, so I think that gives you a flavor of the kind of mix A lot of former athletes. Those athletes tend to be compliant athletes who don't ask a lot of difficult questions. An occasional celebrity, an occasional prince or princess, and then assorted other people who might bring some kind of technical know-how or business acumen to the table.
Speaker 1:Okay, what kind of wealth is involved? The Olympics sells TV access, advertising et cetera. There's also fees. I guess there's people who attend. What kind of sums does the Olympics bring in?
Speaker 2:Yeah, they bring billions upon billions into their coffers every single cycle. And if you want to break it down in terms of where it comes from, 61% come from television broadcaster revenues. So, like NBC, for instance, paid more than $7 billion a little while back to hold the Olympics on their television station through 2032. So 61% come from television broadcasters. Another 30% comes from those corporations that I mentioned, the special worldwide partners of the International Olympic Committee. So if you keep that in mind, that means more than nine out of every $10 that rolls into the International Olympic Committee's coffers comes from those two sources. And not only does it help you understand where they get their money from, but since you eventually want to have a conversation about how to change the Olympics, that might be a decent place to return to later.
Speaker 1:The corporations that do 30% of the income of the Olympics. What are they paying for?
Speaker 2:They're paying for exclusive rights for their brand to be featured. They're paying for exclusive rights to use that Olympic logo on their branding during the Olympic period and despite everything that probably you and I are going to talk about today about the Olympics and the sort of critical side of understanding the Olympic Games, the Olympics are tremendously popular all around the world. They tend to be less popular in the cities that actually hold the Olympics, which I think says something, but they are a popular brand, if you will, around the world, and so they're paying millions upon millions of dollars to be associated with that and to derive a sort of halo effect from being associated with the Olympic Games.
Speaker 1:And you brought up the cities and that's obviously one sort of important. And you brought up the cities and that's obviously one sort of important facet that doesn't often get discussed. You know, people watch it on TV and glorious Rio, glorious Paris, glorious Athens, I remember. But the impact on these cities is a mixed bag. I mean, what is the effect on a city of having the Olympics? And we might as well address what's the likely effect on Los Angeles of having the Olympics in four years, assuming it happens.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you mentioned that. I've been working on this issue for quite a while now, alongside a lot of other social scientists, economists and others, who've really kind of boiled down the underbelly of the Olympics, regardless of where they take place, whether they're in Tokyo, whether they're in Paris, whether they're in Los Angeles. There's certain trends that I think it's helpful maybe to understand if you really want to see what's coming for LA, and the first one is overspending. Every single Olympics, going back to 1960, for which there is reliable data has gone over its initial budget every single Olympics. And so when you do that, you're usually taking public monies that could be spent on other things education, healthcare and so on and you're spending them on an optional sporting festival that lasts for basically two and a half weeks. So that's one trend to be aware of. A second one is the Olympics create a scenario whereby local and national police forces use the games essentially like their own private cash machine to get all the special weapons and laws that they'd never be able to get during normal political times, and those special weapons and laws tend to stay on the books after the Olympics end. They don't like put those surveillance cameras back in the box and return them to send her up. The Olympics are over, we won't be needing these anymore. And in places like, of course, the United States, like Los Angeles, that also means you're increasing the possibilities of racialized policing in the wake of the games militarized, racialized policing.
Speaker 2:A third trend when it comes to the Olympics is the displacement of poor folks, unhoused folks, people who are marginalized in society, like in China ahead of the 2008 Summer Olympics. Their estimates are that more than a million people were displaced to make way for venues for the Olympic Games. When I lived in Rio de Janeiro, some 77,000 people were displaced. That's like a sizable city if you really think about it. In Paris, where I just came back from, there were more than 12,000 people that were lifted off the streets of Paris just in the year before the Olympics happened. That was a 39% uptick, according to the activist group Le Reverse de l'Immidi, the other side of the medal. So there's the displacement of poor folks. You want to get those folks out of the way according to the mentality of police and elected officials, so that when those cameras come from NBC and elsewhere, they don't show poor people on their screens or any kind of social problems.
Speaker 2:A fourth trend is greenwashing, talking a big green game but not actually following through, and we've seen this in Olympics after Olympics. And that's because there's really very little accountability. You can say that the Olympics are going to greenify your city, but there's no entity that actually checks afterwards to see if you followed through on your promises. And then a final trend is just straight up corruption.
Speaker 2:You know the Olympics has a lot of money swishing through the system, as you and I've been talking about. It tends to swish upwards into already full pockets, and sometimes this happens illegally. You know it doesn't take a great historical memory to think back to the Salt Lake City Olympics. That happened in our country here, michael, in the United States, where we found out that the people that were creating the bid for Salt Lake were actually bribing International Olympic Committee officials with free meal replacements for family relatives, free college tuition to attend college in the United States for the kids of these IOC members, and much more. And so those are the five trends that social scientists have really identified. And so if your city is going to host the Olympics, you can expect to have those come to your town.
Speaker 1:So what you're literally describing, it seems to me, is corporate life. It's basically a corporate product being produced. It's produced in the usual corporate fashion, with the usual beneficiaries and with all the usual side effects, except on a grand scale, because we're talking two and a half weeks of product, and so it's a big deal. What do we think about? Even Well, first we should think about should it be just eliminated, should we have no Olympics, on grounds that it has all sorts of adverse attributes?
Speaker 2:Well, first let me just say you're absolutely right. I mean, the Olympics actually are a lens for understanding these really important social problems in society. And you know, you and I happen to be political animals. We follow the political news on the daily, as I'm sure many of your listeners do on Z. But the thing is, sports can be a really great way for jump-starting political conversations with people that you'd otherwise really not be able to talk to about these issues. And so that's definitely what I've found in the last 15 years of doing research is that people who maybe don't think like me politically are willing to talk about these issues of displacement, militarizing police, what do we do with our public money, what about the environment. They're willing to talk about these issues through the context of the Olympic Games. So I would say, for starters, if you want to change the Olympics, you have to have these conversations with people that aren't like-minded. Just a side note, and then I'll talk more about kind of what's going on moving forward here and what we can do.
Speaker 2:But you know, in 1976, denver, right here in the United States, was slated to host the Winter Olympics. You might be thinking Denver, I don't remember that one. That's because it never happened, michael, and that's because people across the political spectrum, once Denver was handed the Olympics by the International Olympic Committee, said you know what we don't want these things by the International Olympic Committee, said you know what we don't want these things? And in fact we want to put something on the ballot that says we can't spend any public money if we host the Olympics. And they won in a landslide. And I just want to point out this was like liberal environmentalists who were concerned about damage to the mountains around Denver, but it was also fiscal conservatives who didn't want to use public money in this kind of way, and so a really interesting coalition happened, and those kind of strange coalitions can happen around sports and around the Olympics.
Speaker 2:So I would say that, for starters, if you want to change the way the Olympics happen, I would say open your eyes to working with people that you might not normally talk to in your everyday political conversations. Second, I would say that talk to people who have had experience in the Olympic City. Their stories are incredibly powerful and in many cases extremely harrowing. I mean even in cities like Los Angeles that hosted one of the supposedly most successful Olympics in 1984. I've interviewed dozens and dozens of them. It really breaks down by race and class People who are people of color or not necessarily rich. They have certain memories of LA 1984. And that was their neighborhoods on lockdown helicopters flying overhead, police being able to do whatever they wanted in your neighborhood, everyone being told to basically stay away from Olympic venues. Then you talk to people like Casey Wasserman, who's heading the LA 28 Olympics son of Lou Wasserman, you know, woke up with a silver spoon essentially in his mouth. People like Eric Garcetti, who, similarly, are doing really well. Former LA mayor, and they had a totally different view of the 1984 Olympics. So start talking to people who are actually affected by the Olympics.
Speaker 2:And then, third, figure out how this money shuffle works, because if you can turn off the money spigot for the International Olympic Committee, then you're actually starting to create a threat to this product, and that's so. You talk to the broadcasters. You talk to some of these corporate sponsors and if you'd think that maybe these corporate sponsors would be crazy to step away, you know it has actually happened. I mean, toyota recently decided to end its relationship with the International Olympic Committee.
Speaker 2:You'll remember, michael, that the Tokyo Olympics of 2020 were put off by a year because of coronavirus, and they were tremendously unpopular inside of Japan, like more than 80% of the population in Japan did not want to host those Olympics. The International Olympic Committee rammed ahead and said oh yeah, you're hosting them, we got some money to make. I mean, they didn't say it quite like that, but that was the reality and you know. So the Olympics happened. Toyota was a sponsor of those Olympics. They didn't air their ads because it was such a toxic property, and so you know you could talk to some of these corporations and see if you could get them to stop forking over these millions upon millions that.
Speaker 1:I wonder you know, as somebody who, I admit, this year I did not watch it as much as in the past, but in the past I typically do watch the Olympics and you know, put in a considerable amount of time, the hoopla, not an objective thing, a created thing, right, and that it's the best, or it's supposedly the best and it's.
Speaker 1:You know, you're seeing the coronation of, and the crowning of, years and years and years of practice and effort, but none of that entails that you bring 10,000 Olympians to one place and build 10 stadiums there in order to host all the different kinds of events, and then, when you leave, you leave the stadiums behind and they become, you know, artifacts that are unused, so that doesn't seem necessary. Beyond that, that's the only dimension that I can see. That isn't who makes the decision and where does the money go. So, as far as where the money goes, presumably a small, well, a considerable, a nice chunk goes to LeBron James and co you know the world's most famous athletes, but I'm sure the people playing badminton aren't cleaning up on it, are they?
Speaker 2:Yeah, let's break this down a little bit, because you know if you're watching the Olympics and people that are listening are watching the Olympics. It certainly wasn't to watch the president of the International Olympic Committee, tomas Bach, deliver a horribly boring speech at the opening Come on speak for yourself.
Speaker 2:That's why I was watching. Oh, you got a bear Bach head over there, are you OK? Well, you know, actually that was kind of interesting, just as a side note. I mean that was kind of interesting. He delivered a terribly boring speech and he had, like this guy, dressed up in an official outfit, holding an umbrella over his head. You'll remember it was raining during the opening ceremony so that Mr Bach didn't get wet, while the poor guy holding the umbrella got totally soaked.
Speaker 2:I think it's a lot of this, but we watch the Olympics because of the athletes. It's not to watch Tomas Bach giving that speech, and so the athletes actually don't get that big of a slice of the money pie. Let's break it down for a second. So you mentioned LeBron James. He's in the National Basketball Association.
Speaker 2:There was a study done by Toronto Metropolitan University that compared the National Basketball Association, the National Football League, the English Premier League of Soccer, the National Hockey League, to the amount of money that athletes were getting from the Olympics. In those other leagues the NBA, et cetera athletes were getting between 45% and 60% of the revenues 45% and 60%. With the Olympics it was 4.1% of the revenues and the study found that it was actually less than 1% if you're talking about direct revenues into athletes' pockets. And so you're actually identifying another source of pushback, and that comes from athletes themselves, and you've seen in recent years, athletes are starting to organize more and more inside of the Olympic sphere. There's a group that people might want to keep an eye out for called Global Athlete, and they're an athlete-led group that are trying to organize athletes around the world, figuring out how to unionize them, how to use their voices to push back and get a bigger piece of the money pie, because the Olympians are what make the Olympics special.
Speaker 2:Now you're absolutely right that within that category of Olympians you've got your LeBron James and you've got your other big names, like Simone Biles, who will get lots of sponsorships and so on, and then you've got the sort of lesser known athletes in the lesser known sports who maybe aren't even going to get a medal.
Speaker 2:And there, you know, we found over time in the United States, because we don't have a strong federal source of funding for Olympic athletes, that many of them end up starting GoFundMe pages and sort of desperately trying to get the money together to make it to the Olympics in the hopes that they can win and then get sponsorships which will help them move their career forward from there. It's a very economically tenuous existence for a lot of these athletes. So not all Olympians are created equal when it comes to that big money shuffle, and that's another point of possibility. I mean, if LeBron James were to stand up with and for other Olympians from these lesser known sports and make a stand, that could go a really long ways in terms of these discussions around the money shuffle and athletes.
Speaker 1:And, just like as with the earlier discussion, the Olympic situation let's call it is replicated in other sports around the world. So if you compare the top golf players to the golf players once you get past I don't know 50, not very many then the income falls off drastically. And the same thing for every other sport. It's not as if the only people who play baseball are in the major leagues. There's the minor leagues, there's the people who wind up, you know teaching and coaching and all the rest of it, and the amateur leagues. But this also raises an issue, because for LeBron James and Steph Curry and all the rest of them, for LeBron James and Steph Curry and all the rest of them, their incomes are at least as odious, at least to my eyes, as what you describe as the overall character of the distribution of income at the Olympics. The idea that these guys are signing contracts for two, three, these guys are signing contracts for two, three, $400 million is ludicrous, and the idea that I mean. I want to ask you what you think about this.
Speaker 1:It's in sports shows. It used to be the case that sports talk was about sports. Now it's often about salaries and trading and where people are going to wind up and the contract that they're going to sign and sometimes the discussion will take the form well, is so-and-so worth $200 million. And of course, the answer is invariably oh, yes, yes, or maybe only $170 million. What that does to the minds of the people who are watching it, if they go along with it, it's a horrific formulation of how people should be remunerated. And if they don't go along with it, I guess they don't watch the sport anymore, or, like me, they sort of are you know, I don't know contradictory. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I have a lot more sympathy for the millionaires who are making lots of money in their short professional careers. I mean, usually they're quite short, so their window of opportunity is is quite limited. And so you know, I I'm really hesitant to make it about a millionaires against billionaires, and when I say that I mean the owners of these teams, in the sense that I think it misses a leverage point of fightback. These millionaires that we're talking about I mean LeBron James is a bit of an exception because he's been in the league for so long and he's got all these other properties Spring Hill video filmmaking company and so on. He's really diversified his portfolio, if you will. So he's kind of a different case off the map.
Speaker 2:But for most of these guys their window of moneymaking is limited and, quite frankly, their windows are calculated against them. What I mean by that is, if you look at the National Football League and you look at the salaries of the players there, their rookie contracts for like the first three to four years of their career are very small. Even the unions haven't been able to get them up that much over time and most players last in the National Football League for 3.5 years. That's because it's a brutal league and has 100% injury rate 100%, michael and so most guys don't make it to that second contract in the National Football League. So they might play two years, get hurt or make it to that second contract negotiation.
Speaker 2:They say you know, you're pretty good, but honestly, we're just going to draft some guy out of college, pay him that crappy rookie contract. They're going to work for three years. Yeah, it seems like they made a lot of money, but like, let's say, six, $8 million over three years, four years. But in the longer term, especially because a lot of these athletes came through the college system, where they essentially sacrificed their education on the altar of their football career, their chances are actually more limited than it might seem, and so I guess I'm a little bit more sympathetic to them. But in bringing it back to the Olympics for a second, I mean, I think that is the place to have conversations. If you can get solidarity between LeBron James and that badminton player that you mentioned, then you're really going to start cooking in the right direction.
Speaker 1:Okay. So I certainly wouldn't disagree with that, nor would I disagree with your. Look at the lower end. Notice. I said two or $300 million a year contracts. Yeah Well, there's no way that a $200 million contract, even if it's for 10 years and at the end of 10 years you don't work for the rest of your life has any proximity of what remuneration should be. So there is a problem. When you go to the really high earners and you ask them to relate to the badminton players. I'm all for it, but from their point of view, if they do that and I'm sure their lawyers and their you know handlers would intervene, so to speak If they do that.
Speaker 1:The next request is precisely the second thing that you brought up, which is okay. How about the other players in the NBA? How about the other players in the NFL or the baseball league? How about we have some sort of approach that approximates sanity? It used to be the case I don't know whether it still is that in Cuba baseball salaries were figured out this way During the baseball season, you would get the salary that you got for the work that you did. In the off season, you would get for the same period of time. In other words, if you were getting N dollars a month, you'd get N dollars a month during the baseball season. It didn't matter how good you were, if you played on the team you got. That. That's sort of interesting. Not perfect by any means, you know, but it obliterates the idea that you should be remunerated for your God-given skill as compared to how hard you're working and how long you're working and so on. Yeah, anyway, that's a separate.
Speaker 2:I hear what you're saying. I think we could go on all day about it, but you know a lot of these guys are coming out. You know because I played professional soccer for many years and I know, I'm about to ask you about that.
Speaker 2:Part of it is, you know, your God given talent. But you know these, these people are workers and they are honing their craft and, and you know it's, it is part God given but it's also, you know, huge work ethic that it takes, especially in the modern day era where just the the lines of difference between player A and B are just so thin and and you know you gotta have a lot moving in your direction. But anyways, yes, we can talk about that all day.
Speaker 1:Well, one follow-up question on that. You were a professional soccer player, you are faculty, you could be in a steel mill, right? Do you think that the the being a professional soccer player is worse than being even in the faculty? Much less worse than being in the steel mill in the sense of deserving more remuneration? Yeah, no, I don't really think about it like that.
Speaker 2:I don't know what you're saying, yeah, I do it should be remunerated similarly yeah, yeah, I mean when I was playing professional soccer in the.
Speaker 1:It should be remunerated similarly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I mean when I was playing professional soccer in the 90s. This was not the path to riches and glory. I mean, don't get me wrong, I was doing fine.
Speaker 1:I know I'm aware of that Very happy with the life that.
Speaker 2:I lived there but you know we weren't talking in the millions here and so it was pretty similar actually at that time and not necessarily, certainly not on par with, like LeBron James and Steph Curry and those folks before, but it does give me a flavor for for understanding some of the dynamics involved in in being a professional athlete and what it takes to get to that kind of level of eventually making it to the Olympics and it's we get to see that end product where they do the triple flip like Simone.
Speaker 1:Biles.
Speaker 2:Leon Bacian, the front swimmer, wins all these medals, but there's a lot of steps along the way there and a lot of sacrifice as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's. That's something I did want to ask you about. I don't know how to ask it, even to make it comfortable for you to answer it. It is rough. I mean it's, and I'm not sure it should be that rough. So when you think of the young kids who are brokered into becoming a professional athlete at the age of what 10, 12, you know, the training starts and they basically don't have the normal life. They have a, you know, an adult's life in a child's body, and not even that. Worse than that, right, it's, it's. I suppose one person might argue yes, but as a result we get to see Simone Biles, and if she hadn't done that, she'd be good, but she wouldn't be that good. So that's one argument. And then the other argument is yeah, but she, you know, would have had a different kind of a life. And when you look at the National Football League, yeah, it's 100% harm, ranging from painful all your life to you can barely move for a good part of your life. You probably read North Dallas 40 back in the day.
Speaker 2:Did you ever read that these guys are sacrificing middle age for their careers? They just go from being a player to basically being elderly. It's brutal.
Speaker 1:I saw on TV an unusually good documentary in which the interviewer was talking to an ex-NFL player In his house. He was on the floor playing with this kid but he couldn't get up. He needed help to get up and the interviewer after a while asked him are you going to let your kid play high school football? He said of course. He said would you want to see your kid in the National Football League? He said, of course. He said you can barely move. You really want to wish that on your kid and there's a degree of rationalization. It would be hard for him to say no is to say he made a mistake. But the whole ethos of sports and you know the pressures and everything that are involved in it are invisible to fans, basically, or most fans.
Speaker 2:I think what you're describing also applies to a lot of Olympians. I mean, let's not forget Simone Biles. It wasn't just all the hard work she put in, the time she put in, but she was part of a horrific sexual abuse scandal from a horrible man, dr Larry Nassar. So there were horrible prices that a lot of these athletes pay. It's not just in gymnastics, unfortunately, that you have these kind of sexual abuse scandals inside of sport. This is really, unfortunately, very common, and so there are all these minefields that these young people are are sidestepping in order to maybe make it, but maybe not. You know, for every single course, there are numerous gymnasts who also went through that horrific system of abuse, whose names we don't didn't make it to the olympics, and so, yeah, I think in that sense, maybe these athletes should be getting paid a little bit more.
Speaker 2:I mean, certainly in the United States very much underpays its Olympic athletes. Like, let me put it this way, if you win a gold medal and you're representing the United States at the Paris 2024 Olympics Olympics, you would make $37,500, 37.5. A silver is like 22.5 and a bronze medal is 15,000.
Speaker 1:Who pays you that when you say you would make that so?
Speaker 2:if you were in the Olympics and you got a gold? Where?
Speaker 1:does that 37 come?
Speaker 2:from United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, based in Colorado, has a fund for that. Now this is changing a little bit because of the fact that certain sports now, such as world athletics, or what people know as track and field, they're starting to pay their gold medal athletes $50,000, starting with the Paris Olympics. That's a bit of a game changer in a certain way. There's also this alternative to the Olympics that's emerging. That hasn't quite got off the ground yet, but it's called the Enhanced Games. The Enhanced Games, basically, is run by this guy named Aaron D'Souza. He worked with Peter Thiel for a long time, the billionaire, and he basically has the same critiques that we've been talking about in terms of athlete health, well-being, in terms of the money shuffle, in terms of displacement, all these things, militarization. But for them the answer isn't like athlete empowerment, like we've been talking about. For them the answer is doping free for all. So that's why they call it the enhanced games, because athletes at their games will use whatever drugs they want.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is all happening right now. You can look it up. Enhanced games they're going to try to do one in 2025. And they have got a lot of money that they're throwing into this enterprise. Same sports, though, you know, like track and field, et cetera, from like track and field and swimming and so on. And then they're also including MMA, so mixed martial arts, which, if you think about it, so you can get all drugged up, steroided up and then do mixed martial arts to your heart's content.
Speaker 2:But the thing about the enhanced games, their plan is they are going to say every athlete that participates will make in the neighborhood of $100,000 a year. That is a lot more than Olympic athletes make today. So my point is just this there is pressure on groups like the International Olympic Committee, on groups like the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, to start paying athletes properly for what they actually do and the joy that they bring to people on these screens. It might happen through securities fashion, it might happen with the help of the enhanced games. We'll have to see. But this is the zeitgeist right now, where we're finally having these conversations after decades upon decades of not even talking about athlete pay really very much at all.
Speaker 1:Let me ask you another question, just as a fan, because I have no inside sort of awareness of the dynamics of these things. You brought up the sex scandals, and I don't know how much you know about that either, but how does it happen? That is, in gymnastics, in skating, there are various sports, I think, which have been plagued by it, which have been plagued by it. What's going on? That it doesn't come to the attention of the parents, or does it come to the attention of the parents and they do nothing about it? In other words, how does it persist?
Speaker 2:See what I'm saying? Yeah, sure, I mean. At the base of it all is like any other workplace is a power imbalance is is taking shape. Second, it often involves these athletes that are under 18. Uh, these, are kids, they don't have, like the, the developmental skills and and know how to, to even know what to do. And if it's normalized, uh, then all the scarier for them, and a lot of these parents that are pushing these Olympic athletes unfortunately kind of lose sight of reality in the pursuit of this.
Speaker 2:That's what I'm wondering, and I mean, I think each case is, of course, different, and I'm certainly not like blaming the grandparents of somebody like Simone Biles, who raised her and seemed to have raised her really well. I'm definitely not. But what I am saying is that some parents will do whatever it takes to reach that goal for their kids and that's just a really toxic mix. And, you know, hopefully, with throwing cretins like Larry Nassar in jail for basically forever, that can help. There's been some movement toward creating this group called Safe Sport, but, quite frankly, it still has a long ways to go in terms of being an effective body, stopping this stuff.
Speaker 1:There's something about it I mean, I love sports, but there's something about it that the kid almost becomes something that you invest in rather than a human being. Right, because there is this possible payoff Well, it's true, possible, incredible payoff and there's a perversion there of what's going on.
Speaker 2:Well, in fact we celebrate it when it works out well for these athletes, but their parents really held their nose to the grindstone, and I'm not saying that maybe we shouldn't. I think each case is different but like the Williams sisters, serena and Venus Williams, they had a really hard driving, motivated father. Richard Williams. Who fascinating guy. But if it would have gone a different direction, he might not be celebrated so much today as held in contempt. Did you see the movie? Yeah, I did.
Speaker 1:I found it incredible, but I wondered, of course, how much of it was true.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you don't know, based on books, but you know who knows, I get Serena Williams Based on books, but you know who knows, I get Serena Williams on your show and you can find out right from her. I'll have her on the show, yeah, okay, I've got another fan question for you that maybe you can answer for me and maybe it's a stupid question, but we watch, let's say, a sport like basketball and a stupendous team has an off night right, and the off night is strikingly different than the on night. There's a gap. You watch track and field and swimming, and it seems like it isn't just that they don't have a big off night, it's that they come within a tenth or a hundredth of a second of their best time every time. I don't understand how that's possible.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean the margins these days. I mean I think Paris really got that. It's incredible and these margins really matter to these athletes' futures, because if you get fourth place at the Olympics, you know it's basically a big nothing burger you've earned.
Speaker 1:I mean you really might be a tenth of a second. It might be a four hundredths of a second.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, look at the men's this year. I mean it was all decided just by hundreds thousands of a second, even this year. I mean it was all decided just by hundreds thousands of a second, even so, um, yeah, and, and it really spins out in terms of these athletes monetize ability of their own careers moving forward If you get fourth place. That's what a lot of these athletes who got fourth place and lost to a doper feel really bitter about, because they get their medals. Like 12 years down the road, they finally get their metal, but their earning capabilities that they would have had had they got the bronze or silver way back when have been squelched and instead they got fourth, fifth place but they got beat by a doper. So you know that's. Another thing that you hear a lot about from athletes is how disappointed they were, not just to lose out on the medal, but if they lose out to a doper, all the worse.
Speaker 1:I can understand it. You know, in the crazy world we live in, all sorts of reactions make sense in context. But objectively should they get more because they won by a hundredth of a second before the other one, you know be better off materially? It doesn't make any sense to me at all. So you know the the question about remuneration is is sort of bigger than uh, or it's more diverse, I guess I don't know what exactly to call it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:How do they view it All right? So let me see if I can pose it in terms of soccer. You go out and play. How about this? Would you rather be in a game or even a series that ends in a conclusion? You know like a and play really good, interesting games that are close and exciting down to the wire, or trounce the other team. You lose the close games or the close series. You win the trounce.
Speaker 2:Huh, well, you know, I have to say I think it depends on your opponent. You know, every, every team has their arch rivals. And so, like I'm in Portland, oregon, and the arch rival of the professional men's soccer team is the Seattle Sounders, and I think if I were a player today on the Portland Timbers, I would take the trounce over the rival any day of the week just to rub it in their face a little bit. It's kind of part of the fun, but should it? Be that way? Oh hey, I don't know.
Speaker 1:I'm just telling you what it's like from my perspective but I want to, I want to know what you think. In other words, as you think about it, should you get more pleasure from a game that you played really well and it was exciting, and that you you lost in a close contest or a game that you know you're just much better than the opponent and you trounced them?
Speaker 2:yeah, I mean, I think certain people value process more and certain people value outcome more. I think it's going to depend on the individual you're talking to and the context they're working in.
Speaker 1:All true Myself.
Speaker 2:I love that feeling when you are playing well with your team and you're making things happen, regardless of whether you happen to be scoring goals or not. But that feeling of the process really was really important to me. But I can't say that's the case with everybody. And if you hear coaches talking after games these days in professional soccer, that almost has nothing to do with it whatsoever. It's almost exclusively about results. And again it comes back to the money side because, yeah, that's what I was just going to say yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean it's the commercialization and the money side, and the fact that everything depends on that perverts what I think is the really positive dimension of competition and athletics.
Speaker 2:I mean, if you think back to the 1920s and 30s, there were alternatives to the Olympics during this time period that had that kind of ethos that you're pointing us to here, and those were the workers games, largely organized by socialists and communists in Western Europe at that time. And they had the women's games in the 1920s and 30s because women were largely excluded from the early days of the Olympics. The guy who founded the Olympics was just a straight up sexist who thought women shouldn't participate in sports, let alone the Olympics, and so they created their own games, these women in the 1920s and 30s. And if you look at those workers games of the 1920s and 30s, what you see is there were categories for those who are very serious and really wanted to win and see how much they could push their bodies. Then beneath that there would be like sort of a people that were somewhat serious, and then there were people that just want to try the sport and have a little bit of fun. There was space for that in these events.
Speaker 2:Well, you don't see that today at the modern Olympics. I mean, there's already more than 10,000 athletes. It's already super expensive, and that ethos is just like not something as part of the Olympics as much as they talk about, it's important to be just out there playing the game in reality, the people that are really valued if you look at the Olympic website, the Olympicscom is the people that win. So you know there's often a gap between the rhetoric and the reality when it comes to the Olympic Games and how athletes are treated.
Speaker 1:No question, and how athletes are treated, no question, I mean. It's interesting because it's the more social, let's call it or the more excel that is. Play really well, play against an opponent who brings out the best dynamic does exist, I think, to a degree at lower levels, probably not high school football, but it does. You know. It is creeping into the school system a little bit, I think, and it gets ridiculed as oh, you get a certificate of excellence just for showing up that kind of formulation.
Speaker 1:We used to play this is 1968, 69, we used to play what we called socialist basketball. What it was was you would be playing and you would keep score, but a player who was defending somebody where the defender is really, really good, instead of shutting the person down, you had to play in such a way as to bring out the best in the person. Wow. Same thing for the offensive players. And so the score ultimately didn't really matter, but it was.
Speaker 1:But it wasn't easy. You know it was very hard to do. It's uh, I don't know. There's something about. Uh, there's something good about elements of competition, but there's something bad about it also. There's something good about elements of competition, but there's something bad about it also. And getting rid of the bad and magnifying the good, you'd think might be a goal for a good society. But it isn't even easy to figure out what it means. But it does mean something. It certainly doesn't mean that kids break their bodies or adults break their bodies and become crippled, or whole cities get exploited and all the rest of it. If you had to guess what LA is going to be like, that's probably a stupid question. We don't even know if it will happen. Let's say Harris wins and the country is pretty much the way it's been Okay, and LA happens. What do you think?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I actually don't think it matters whether Harris or Trump wins in terms of the LA Olympics. I mean, whoever wins will be president for the LA Olympics. Right Back a few years ago, president Trump, when he was President Trump, he sat down at a table with Casey Wasserman, who's the leader of the LA bid, as I mentioned before, and he assured Mr Wasserman that the federal government would foot the bill for security. So that's probably in the neighborhood of two to three billion dollars, if past games are any kind of indication, and I don't think that Harris would have done anything different.
Speaker 2:For events like the Olympics in the United States they're called National Special Security Events. It's a special designation that was created in the 1990s that allows for more than a dozen different intelligence organizations at the federal level to basically have free reign in the Olympic City. And Los Angeles did something recently that I've never seen before in preparation for an Olympic Games. Is they called a national special security event, into effect already more than three years away from the actual Olympic Games, almost four years away now from the Olympics, and so the groups like Immigration and Customs Enforcement already have free reign pretty much free reign inside of Los Angeles, whether they're doing much with it right now. We just don't know. It's highly secretive. So we know that's coming for Los Angeles. So Los Angeles has a high population of undocumented folks there. They should be very concerned about this national special security event.
Speaker 2:One other thing we already know about Los Angeles is that there's a rambunctious anti-Olympics group already that's formed and has been active for some eight years at this point, and they're called Nolympics LA. Nolympics LA emerged out of the Democratic Socialists of America's housing and homelessness chapter and they have a very astute analysis of the Olympic Games based on a lot of the things you and I have been talking about today. And they're organizing with allies across the city, and they're really ramping up their efforts now that the Paris Olympics are over and they've literally, like, handed the torch to LA, or at least the flags, and so there's a battle brewing in Los Angeles and right now, what's their what's their aim, in other words, yeah, no Olympics.
Speaker 2:La's aim is nolympics anywhere. They're part of a transnational coalition of anti-Olympics groups that don't want to have the Olympics in any city and they oppose the Olympics anywhere for the reasons that we've been talking about today. Now they are working with other groups that maybe don't have quite that mentality. So, unions, there's an incredible opportunity for unions when you have the Olympics. So, unions, there's an incredible opportunity for unions when you have the Olympics In Paris. Train drivers, garbage collectors, police they all got massive salary raises because they threatened to go on strike during the Olympics and that just wasn't going to happen.
Speaker 2:So groups like that, like some of the unions in Los Angeles, if they're worth their salt they're preparing kind of strategies like that. But they might not be necessarily against the Olympics per se, like full on against the Olympics, like Nolympics LA is, but they're part of, perhaps part of a coalition. So those are going to be some of the tensions moving forward. It's not going to be easy. But one thing I'll say about the Nolympics LA group not only are they very informed on these issues and been following them for a long time, but they actually have really good connections inside of Hollywood, so that could actually change the game in certain respects. They have had a number of celebrities who have done things with the group and for the group. They've also been interviewed on like celebrities, uh television stations. Like Tim Heidecker has a show and he's had no Olympics people on before.
Speaker 2:Uh, john Mulaney, a famous, well-known comedian, recently had a skit critiquing the Los Angeles Olympics, and my understanding as part of that is because one of the writers was with Nolympics LA for a long time, and so you know a really interesting fight is brewing there, and plus you throw climate change on top of it. I mean it's hotter than heck right now, as we're talking in Los Angeles, would you want to really throw Paralympians into the situation where it's like 119 in the valley in Los Angeles right now, and so that's the sort of climatological elephant in the room is climate change, and it's going to be a real issue when it comes to Los Angeles. So you know a lot for us to continue to talk about moving toward Los Angeles, and you can bet that I'll be following it carefully myself, michael.
Speaker 1:How do you view yourself and Olympics? It's like it's your subject, it's does that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean yeah, how did it?
Speaker 1:happen. You went to one and then it just. You went to the next and, yeah, maybe with it.
Speaker 2:Maybe monomaniacal tendencies occasionally have ups, upsized, michael, I don't know. But uh, you know, I started in 2009. I'm in portland, oregon, and I had friends, activists, avant-garde poets, up the road in vancouver that told me wow, you got to get up here because at that time I was, my research and writing was about the suppression of dissent in north america how the government media suppressed political dissent, and they were like that's a suppression of dissent in North America, how the government and media suppress political dissent. And they were like that's a suppression of dissent-o-rama up here in Vancouver. You got to get up here and cover it, and so I did.
Speaker 2:I went up there, I wrote an article for Counterpunch about what I learned and I wrote some other stuff for places like the Guardian and elsewhere, and I realized in the process of investigating what was happening in terms of the suppression of dissent in Vancouver that, wow, there's a lot more going on with these Olympics.
Speaker 2:And so I just kept learning more and more and I've never gotten tired of it. I keep learning new things all the time. When I was just in Paris covering the Olympics with the great sports writer Dave Zirin here in the last month or so, I learned so much just being on the ground and talking to actual people who are affected by the Olympics. So long as I'm continuing to learn things, I'm a happy person and you know I get to learn new languages. I learned Portuguese before I went and lived in Rio for that time, in 2015, 2016. And I've been learning French for the last couple of years and now I'm in formal studies here in French. So there's a lot of side benefits to the process and I don't see turning away anytime soon.
Speaker 1:That's interesting and remarkable. Well, I guess you're the world's foremost scholar on the Olympics.
Speaker 2:Is that fair? Well, I don't know if I'd categorize myself like that, but I certainly-.
Speaker 1:Well, I will.
Speaker 2:Among the most I would say that, maybe, but yeah, among the most.
Speaker 1:I would say that maybe, but yeah.
Speaker 2:Covered diverse grounds, but is there something that you feel like you'd like to say before we wind up that we haven't gotten to yet? Well, I mean just the last thing. I would say that if you really are serious about changing the Olympics, abolishing the Olympics, fixing the Olympics, the place to really start is where we started this conversation, that's, with the International Olympic Committee. They've become such an incredible bastion of privilege these days, totally disconnected from the experiences and the struggles of athletes that you know. I really think it's time for the International Olympic Committee to go. They're actually part of the problem, and so I would advocate for replacing them, or maybe just putting the Olympics on pause until we can figure out an ethical group of people to run the Olympic Games, giving athletes more power I think has got to be the equation I was going to say you replace them with some kind of mechanism involving the athletes.
Speaker 2:But not just any athletes, because they already have a lot of athletes inside and former athletes inside of the International Olympic Committee. We need critically minded athletes who understand the actual problems with the Olympic Games for everyday people in the host city, like we've been talking about Not little issues around the side. It takes a special kind of athlete to take that and there's plenty of them around and an increasing number of them as well. And I just think last point, you know, if the Olympics want to remain relevant, they really need to grapple with the realities of climate change. Every two years, when you have the winter or summer Olympics, they always claim pretty much to be the greenest games ever.
Speaker 2:Paris just claimed the same thing. Well, the bar is really low for starters. And second, there are real questions as to whether you can even be a sustainable Olympics. You know, we interviewed the great scholar from Canada, madeline Orr, when we were in Paris Dave Zirin and I did and she told us that a sustainable Olympics is an oxymoron and this is her bailiwick. This is what she studies. And you know you just got to get your handles around that one because you know, like I said, los Angeles climate change there's going to be a real collision there, and so I just a lot of issues moving forward.
Speaker 1:Isn't a big part of the problem that the Olympics basically says, okay, let's bring 10,000 athletes from all over the world I don't know how how many sports are there roughly in the Olympics?
Speaker 2:Well, they don't count. Sports there's like disciplines. I guess you say 28 for now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Okay, so let's call it 30. So there's 30 competitive arenas and they're bringing athletes from all over the world for each of those competitive arenas and, in essence, it's a world championship in each arena. That's right, right. So why couldn't it be in 30 different places?
Speaker 2:Right People have suggested this, and the International Olympic Committee has zero interest in that. Zero interest Because it would lose the commercial hoopla.
Speaker 2:They love traveling the world, they love spreading the gospel of the Olympics. They love the perks. I mean, if you're on the International Olympic Committee there's a lot of perks. They get $900 a day and per diem alone. If you're on the executive committee, only $450 and per diem alone If you're just a regular old member of the IOC. They like the travel, they like to get around the world. People have suggested oh, keep it in one city like Athens, or rotate it among other cities. The IOC has shown zero interest in this whatsoever, let alone that very interesting, plausible, sensible idea that you just suggested about world championships in different cities.
Speaker 2:Because they say that's what makes the Olympics special, that you bring all these athletes together in one place, that's the thing right?
Speaker 1:I doubt it's the perks of the travel, because you could theoretically just travel to all 30 places. You could extend the perks right. I'm not saying you should, but you could. I think it's something about the ethos of everybody in one place, everybody focuses on it, whereas if there's a championship in track and field, well, what happens. When there's a championship in track and field, well, what happens when there is a championship in track and field?
Speaker 2:It's nothing like the Olympics right. Right, they already have that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and there's nothing. It's nothing like the Olympics, so there's something about bringing everybody together that allows you to ramp up the hoopla.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's true, and I mean they have done some events in different places. Like you might have seen, in Paris 2024, they held the surfing competition in Tahiti, tahiti right. Setting aside the colonial lacquer on that situation, there was the fact that the International Olympic Committee and Olympic organizers, really from Paris 2024, wanted to build a new tower so that NBC and these other companies could get the best views of the surfing and so the judges could have a better view, I guess, and in doing so, they destroyed or damaged deeply a coral reef. There's videos online of people screaming, locals from Teahupo, tahiti, screaming as their coral reef was being ground up by this barge that came in to build this. So you know, they have done events in other parts of the world, like surfing, and they just make a mess of that, but it doesn't usually go all that well. So there's that as well.
Speaker 1:Well, all right. As with most aspects of the modern world, when you get into the details it's worse rather than better, than you know the bad image that you had, but there's also the potential to go forward. This is Mike Albert signing off until next time. Maybe we'll have you back again. Folks should know we actually tried to record this two weeks ago and we had a technical glitch, so I thanked you then for participating, but I'll thank you again for participating, so thank you very much for coming on.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Michael.