{"id":1546,"date":"2016-08-11T11:14:25","date_gmt":"2016-08-11T15:14:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/?p=1546"},"modified":"2016-08-11T13:16:03","modified_gmt":"2016-08-11T17:16:03","slug":"the-neo-pagan-limits-of-the-olympics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/?p=1546","title":{"rendered":"The Neo-Pagan Limits of the Olympics"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Rio<\/a><\/p>\n

The much-awaited Olympics is now upon us in Rio, a city in a country in a continent mired in unmanageable debt and corruption.\u00a0 Surrounded by poverty-stricken\u00a0favelas<\/em>, the city has poured billions into Olympic venues, security, advertisement, all to watch a few thousand overhyped young athletes strive to excel at their chosen sport.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Don’t get me wrong: I do not harbour any dislike, to say nothing of hatred, for athletics.\u00a0 In fact, I have enjoyed many pleasant hours playing various kinds of games at a recreational level, even though, partly due to the circumstances of my life, I mostly enjoy solitary physical activities, cycling, kayaking and hiking.\u00a0 Perhaps I find them more conducive to prayer and reflection, or perhaps it is connected in some subconscious way to the memory that no one wanted to pick me for a team as a wee lad.\u00a0 You know, past traumas and all that.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

So allow me to clarify that I find it very difficult to care about\u00a0professional\u00a0<\/em>sports which have, by and large, become a bloated, idolatrous entity, blown vastly out of proportion to their importance to our culture.\u00a0 As the well-worn analogy goes, sports arenas are our new cathedrals, and the players our new panoply of saints, to whom we offer devotion and praise.\u00a0 Grown men quite literally weep and gnash their teeth when their team seems to be on the verge of losing, or winning; people riot in the streets regardless of the outcome.\u00a0 Much of our lives revolves around sports, and even those who are not ‘fans’ (short, of course, for ‘fanatics’) are caught up in the hype of the big events, the current Olympics, the World Cup, the Stanley Cup, the Super Bowl, and so on.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I have never been one for this charade, not least for the reason that I would rather ride a bike than watch another man do so.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Of course, watching sports does give one a sense of vicarious enjoyment, especially if one participates in the sport in question.\u00a0 Seeing the cyclists of the\u00a0Tour de France<\/em>\u00a0pedalling through the glorious scenery of the Pyrenees, one can imagine oneself doing the same thing, perhaps a tad slower, of course, on a less expensive bike, and with a bit more clothing.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Yet what have sports become?\u00a0 We may judge the value with which we hold a thing by how much\u00a0money\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0time\u00a0<\/em>we are willing to spend on it, and we as a culture spend far too much of these valuable entities on this ultimately rather utilitarian activity.\u00a0 Parents devote their entire weekends driving their children, boys and now girls, from game to game, tournament to tournament.\u00a0 Sunday Mass? \u00a0Prayer? Cultural activities?\u00a0 Reading?\u00a0 Music? \u00a0Family time?\u00a0 Do most modern families even consider such a scale of priorities?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

At the professional level, sports have become a money-driven machine, with their millionaire players selling their set of skills to the highest bidder amongst the billionaire owners.\u00a0 Team loyalty?\u00a0\u00a0 So long as they pay me enough; and if ‘my team’ does not perform well, I can be traded before the playoffs.\u00a0 Geographical loyalty, and rooting for the ‘home team’?\u00a0 How many players are actually from, or care a fig for, the town or city whose name the team adopts, or even from a contiguous region or country, for which they play?\u00a0 How many actually even live there?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Olympics brings this charade to its apogee, or nadir as the case may be, with untold billions now thrown into its gaping, insatiable maw (at the last venue, the impoverished Russians will be paying off the\u00a0$15 billion<\/em>\u00a0tag for Sochi perhaps until judgement day, and Rio will be no different.\u00a0 Montreal just finished paying off its own debt from the more-sober era of the 1976 Olympics a few years ago).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

We watch the desperate athletes, after spending their entire lives training, trying to shave quite literally a\u00a0thousandths of a second<\/em>\u00a0off the last recorded time, a result dependent upon so many other factors (wind, a cold virus, altitude, cloud cover, climate change, you name it) that ‘chance’ has about as large a role as ‘effort’.\u00a0 Their whole lives\u00a0revolve around their body and its training until, in their mid-twenties, it is worn out, and they are often left injured, disillusioned and depressed as they drift into sedentary middle-age.\u00a0 I wonder especially of the female athletes, delaying marriage and family, as they pummel and morph their bodies into lean, muscular male-like physiques, all for the sake of a gold bauble, or something far less.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Here is something to ponder:\u00a0 No matter how much humans train, some animal will always beat them handily.\u00a0 The world record holder for the 100\u00a0 metre dash, Usain Bolt, ran it in 9.58 seconds.\u00a0 Compare the fastest human with\u00a0Sarah the 11 year old cheetah<\/a>, well into late-middle age for the large cat, who \u00a0lies around most of the day, and who can run the same distance easily in 5.95 seconds.\u00a0 No one will ever out-wrestle a chimpanzee, even if defanged and declawed, for they have four times the strength of an adult male, nor out bench-press a gorilla, who could probably lift a humvee with ease and can bend tempered steel; and who will ever out-swim a dolphin, which can clock speeds of\u00a0 25 miles per hour (Michael Phelps, the Olympic prodigy whose feats will likely never be repeated, swims at his best 6 miles per hour).\u00a0 And none of these animals ‘train’ in our sense of the word.\u00a0 They’re just born that way.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Higher, faster, stronger? Scientists estimate that we are perhaps shaving off 1\/100 of a second on records each Olympics, and one physiologist claims the fastest any human can ever possibly run the 100 metres is 9.44 seconds, and the same asymptotic limits apply to most other timed sports.\u00a0 And, as we have witnessed of late, many of these records are tainted by doping and other nefarious activities.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Whatever ‘excellence’ the Olympians are striving after, it is not specifically\u00a0human<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>excellence.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There was a reason why the Olympics were, until recently, limited to amateurs, and forbidden to professionals.\u00a0 The originators of the Olympic ideal thought it unseemly and inhuman to devote one’s whole life and existence to ‘sport’, which should be a leisurely activity, done on the side.\u00a0 After all, there are many other higher, specifically human pastimes and virtues, music, art, science, literature, contemplation, which we do not share with animals, and which are far more fitting to cultivate.\u00a0 That was part of the sub-plot of the great 1981 Olympic film\u00a0Chariots of Fire<\/em>:\u00a0 Beware of making sports professional and all-consuming, for we risk a loss of a significant part of our humanity.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Church has always warned against the danger of such a ‘cult of the body’, a “neo-pagan notion” leading one “to sacrifice everything for (the body’s) sake, to idolize physical perfection and success at sports” (cf., CCC, #2289).\u00a0 Along with this idolization of the body goes a perverse hedonism, as we see in the\u00a0spike in Tinder usage<\/a>\u00a0in the Olympic village, a smartphone app which allows its users to ‘hook up’ with those whom one finds immediately attractive, by swiping their photo.\u00a0 To ‘facilitate’ this fornicatory process,\u00a0450,000 condoms<\/em>\u00a0were handed out to the athletes.\u00a0 Given there are about 11,000 competitors, that’s about 41 condoms per person, or 82 per couple, which is saying something for a two week event.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I would have thought sexual incontinence would decrease one’s athletic performance, draining one’s focus, attention and determination (as you may recall from the first\u00a0Rocky<\/em>\u00a0film, and, more historically, Roman legionaries).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Of course, I hope and presume most athletes do develop other skills and virtues besides sports and ‘hooking up’, particularly virtues of the mind and soul, to which the body is most definitely subordinate, so they can thrive in terms of what it\u00a0really<\/em>\u00a0means to be human, beyond their brief, all-too-short athletic careers, over almost before they begin.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

We must always bring ourselves back to reality and realize with the full focus of our intellect that most sports are simply\u00a0a bunch of guys, and now girls, running, swimming, fighting, or throwing, hitting and chasing a piece of rubber around various kinds of surfaces<\/em>, which animals (and now robots) can do far better.\u00a0 \u00a0Such activities are not the point of life, at least of human life.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Yet much of our time, our energy, our focus, are consumed by them, and many men quite religiously spend their entire weekends and time off watching younger, fitter men (and women) do things they only wish they could do.\u00a0 Harmless fun, to an extent, I suppose; a vicarious form of warfare sublimating our aggression, perhaps; a way to perfect one’s body, yes, but only if one participates in ‘real life’, getting out of Plato’s illusory cave of televised entertainment, into the real world where we can live and move and have our being. \u00a0It is all a matter of perspective, and we in our artificial modern age have sadly put the last things first, and first things last.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

With the many positive aspects of sports, let us always bring things back to such a real perspective, and what it\u00a0truly<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>means to be human.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The much-awaited Olympics is now upon us in Rio, a city in a country in a continent mired in unmanageable debt and corruption.\u00a0 Surrounded by poverty-stricken\u00a0favelas, the city has poured billions into Olympic venues, security, advertisement, all to watch a few thousand overhyped young athletes strive to excel at their chosen sport.   Don’t get […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1546"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1546"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1546\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1550,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1546\/revisions\/1550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}