Ask any sports reporter why they cover simple games between bulky, sweaty jocks as opposed to something with a bit more meaning and somewhere down the line, you're bound to get the standard "sports combine every aspect of our world" argument.
It's a valid argument. The essential stories that build our culture can be seen in almost every sport.
The rise to greatness and the subsequent fall (Vick, Bonds, Isiah). The refusal to give in to naysayers (Kobe, Eli, the Spurs). Coming close to the top of the mountain only to have it held out of reach by the hand of a better (everyone who went against Jordan).
Aesop couldn't write these stories any better.
But there is always a moment when that argument simply loses its thunder.
Enter this year's Olympics.
We all know the story: China's recent problems in Tibet have many calling out for boycotts of this year's Olympics in Beijing. The justification: It's a chance for sports to influence politics.
Sounds good and benign on a T-shirt, doesn't it? The problem, however, is that it assumes sports actually influence as opposed to simply reflect.
When Tommie Smith and John Carlos put up clenched fists at the 1968 Summer Olympics, it was an example of Black Panther sentiments already existent and growing in the United States. The fists didn't magically put the ideas in the U.S.; the ideas put the fists in the Olympics. The Fab Five's baggy shorts, black socks and black shoes were byproducts of what was being worn on the blacktops, not the other way around. Culture doesn't take cues from sport; sport gets its cues from culture.
"Politics is the stuff of life, and so is sport, and they are inseparable," former Olympic gold medalist and current chairman for London's Olympic organizing committee Sebastian Coe said in a recent interview with the Associated Press. "What we have to remember is that sport is not the first resort, it's not the front line of politics. You can't ask the International Olympic Committee to do things that the United Nations Security Council is in a better position to do."
And that is where the calls for boycotts lose their steam. The IOC is in the business of organizing a sporting event, not making grand statements on politics. That's why we have presidents and leaders. Politics is their arena.
"Why should athletes do what politicians haven't been able to do for years?" Dirk Nowitzki told the German news channel n-tv. "They should have known [by naming Beijing as host] that there would be trouble, but sport itself is non-political."
An Olympic boycott will have minimal effect on the political arena. And for that marginal impact, a lot of athletes would be giving up the last four years. It doesn't add up to me.
"I'd like to think anybody that has even contemplated [a boycott] just has a cursory glance at history to see how futile they are," Coe said. "There's never been a more important time to redefine, reaffirm the values of international sport, but boycotts frankly don't work. I would like to think that most people have learned that lesson." Apparently not.
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