The Prison of Measured Time by Andy Newman on 18 August, 2008

http://socialistunity.com/the-prison-of-measured-time/

It is quite extraordinary to see that Britain is still third in the medal table in the Beijing Olympics. This may be Britain’s last Olympics of course, if Scotland votes for independence in 2010! Indeed, the spiraling costs of the London Olympics may be a factor in that referendum – why should the Scots pay through taxes for London Olympics? But it is also clear that the medals are predominantly coming because funding has been targeted towards a few sports, cycling, rowing and yachting. Back in 2005 I observed that the Department of Culture, Media and Sport had admitted that £340 million will be channelled from the existing sports lottery distributors. So the Olympics actually took money away from participative sport provision for ordinary people, and channelled it towards elite professional athletes.

Meanwhile, teenagers and people on modest income are priced out of sports centres by high charges by local authorities. The GB cycling team was funded to the tune of £22.2 million by UK Sport, the body that distributes funding under the World Class performance Programme. I haven’t checked the final figures, but back in 2005 the predicted spending was £57.5 million to support just 320 elite competitors, plus a further £16 million to their sporting bodies. This Includes £600000 to support one professional weightlifter; £5.3 million for the equestrian team, £2 million for high diving, and over £1 million for the archery team. The aim of UK Sport is to increase Britain’s Olympic medal tally. But note that the funding does not go towards sports where there is mass participation or even spectator interest. It is focussed onto activities where individuals can be groomed to produce maximum results. The sporting ideal represented by the Olympics was described the French Marxist, Jean-Marie Brohm, as “physical torture put on as entertainment … held up as politically neutral and culturally legitimate“. This is absolutely correct, and there is far too little critical examination of the negative effect of competitive sport pushing the human body to the limits of its physical capacity. For example the British marathon runner Paula Radcliife has explained that her distinctive head rolling while running is a mechanism for dealing with the debilitating pain she experiences. A French army instructor expressed the philosophy brilliantly on a TV reality show, saying “pain is weakness leaving the body“. The remarkably successful Rebecca Romero, who has now won gold medals in both rowing and cycling, has a special talent for being able endure pain, that is described by today’s Independent as “scary”.

It is instructive that the sports which exemplify the Olympics are those based upon direct comparative measurement: for example, athletics, swimming, weightlifting, cycling, skiing and boxing. The competition is between those who can best sublimate their human individuality and transform their body into a machine for producing the most efficient performance: the transformation of human beings into abstract physical labour that can be measured and compared. It is no coincidence that the origin of these alienated sports where the element of play is entirely absent coincided with the emergence of wage labour as the dominant relationship of production; a process which removed play and enjoyment from the daily experience of productive labour.

Of course, the increased popularity of weightlifting and aerobic exercise in gyms and fitness clubs is due not only to an increasing cultural recognition of the benefits of exercise, but also because the endorphin rush experienced when the body is pushed to the limits of its physical strength or endurance is genuinely pleasurable. This is a legitimate and (in moderation) a healthy and beneficial leisure activity.

However, to compete at an international level subverts the pleasure and benefit of moderate physical exercise and turns it into a masochistic regime where human beings are subordinated to maximising the outputs of their own bodies, even at the cost of their long term health or mental well being. The Olympics – and even more so the Tour de France – are dominated by performance enhancing drugs, and the effective collusion by the sports’ governing bodies. What is more, the training infrastructure and the development of sports science is much more advanced in the developed economies of the imperialist powers. So every four years the Olympics gives an opportunity for the great powers to ideologically demonstrate that their world dominance is underpinned by an implicit biological and racial superiority. This is one of the impetuses behind the prestige of holding the games – an orgy of conspicuous consumption that validates the host nation as a major power. And alongside the sporting content there are huge financial interests, in the construction of the stadiums – which will largely lay empty and unused after the jamboree is over – in the construction of housing and transport infrastructure; In advertising and sponsorship; in security and administration; and of course in Television and broadcast rights. The Olympics reinforces the ideology of sport as being coincidental with a classless, idealised national interest. Of course this is true to an extent of all international competitive sport, but the nature of the sports being pursued by Team GB are those where play and spontaneity are most absent. This leads to an insidious acceptance of the ideological construct of the sport as measurement of abstract alienated labour – a fully developed capitalist industry based upon the competition of idealised people acting as machines. A society based upon the primacy of meeting human needs, and valuing the well balanced health and happiness of people may include competitive play, but it will never award gold medals for those who submit to an iron tyranny of the clock and the measuring tape as arbiters of human worth.