The Olympic ideal is still a winner

By ANNE McELVOY

The Olympics are so grandiose and yet so familiar to us. Each of them is a marker in time, a way to remember how we were the last time we stayed up to watch them and how far we have travelled in between.

The be-medalled figures interweave with our own lives: demi-gods and goddesses who spring and somersault their hour in our living rooms every four years.

Where were you (if you already were at all) when Bob Beamon tore up the long-jump record in 1968, and the American sprinters gave the Black Power salute on the victory podium? Remember Mark Spitz, Valery Borzov and Olga Korbut fighting out the superpower conflict variously in the pool, on the track and the beam in Munich 1972? The images have an almost painful innocence about them, foreshadowing the slaughter of the Israeli athletes by terrorists.

The images cluster, dissolve and remake themselves through the prism of our memories. Today, I realise with a jolt that the child who watched Korbut was four years later training in a gym after school, inspired by Nadia Comaneci's perfect 10 and still hopeful, as one is at 11, of getting there too. By the time that Coe and Ovett slugged it out in Moscow in 1980 that hope was gone, but that was all right, because 15 is different from 11.

The world's shifting clumps of territory, its wars and spats are commemorated just as faithfully. In 1992, we watched a united German team uneasily coming to terms with the sporting consequences of unification. The countries of the former Soviet Union competed separately for the first time, to the merry confusion of the Russian commentators hailing the skating gold of Oksana Baiul of Ukraine in the Winter Games:

"Da! Da! Da! Our little Oksana has done it - well, dear viewers, when I say 'our,' I don't want to offend anyone in Ukraine, but they'll forgive us tonight." For once, they did.

The chances are that even the least sports-loving of us have some of these associations of the great and the small. Just when we think maybe we won't bother to get so involved, we can watch our own children transfixed by the crack of the starting gun, the anthems and flags and the glint of gold - all right, silver plated with gold; nothing is quite what is seems. Another four years pass.

From 1936, when the Berlin Games provided a backdrop for Hitler's vision of Aryan prowess so rudely interrupted by Jesse Owens, the Olympics became symbols of an age, chronicles of ambition and disappointments, magnified by television - prizes beyond gold plate for the successful. "If you want to make a million," Florence Griffith Joyner is alleged to have said to the fellow athlete she bought hormone enhancers from, "you have to spend a couple of thousand." Sound financial logic: broken life.

She, like the East German women whose bodies were treated as experimental laboratories by a state that hoped medals could make up for other shortcomings, became a victim of a relentless quest for glory, of officials turning a blind eye and a sporting establishment too lazy or resigned to wage the thankless, unending battle against drugs in sport.

The Chinese, fearing a doping scandal that would sweep away their hopes of hosting the games in 2008, have grounded their athletes. That is a small triumph in the war. It also reminds us how globalised sporting ambition has become.

In 1924, half the world - including the Chinese - could not afford to train or send teams to the games, let alone fill them full of hormones. Somalia will send its first woman to run, despite her father's fears that she will never find a Muslim husband after appearing in public in shorts.

In 1936, Owens jumped to gold in the long jump after advice from his German rival, Lutz Long. They were friends until Long died on the Eastern Front and Owens ended up running against horses to make money.

Even the more recent dramas and traumas recede so quickly. One reason that the documentary One Day in September, a harrowing account of Munich, was so well received in Britain was that the details had been over-written by more comfortable memories.

Moscow and Los Angeles were victims of the Cold War's tendency to turn everything into a bargaining chip or a symbol. Hence the pointless boycotts and the sense of medals incompletely won.

In more certain geopolitical climes, the games are free to get richer, bigger, faster. A dream is for sale down at your local sports shop. Modernity is fascinated by the pursuit of physical perfectibility - and the parody of it. We are all Olympians now, buying state-of-the-art Nike shoes although we never actually run anywhere.

At the same time, we are more uncertain of whether the Olympics show us the triumph of the human spirit or the wondrous effects of the sporting pharmacy at work on a receptively honed body.

Ben Johnson's fall was when we realised that gold was not a pure metal. Having hauled our own unrippling bodies out of bed at 3 am to see him, it felt like a personal insult when he tested positive. Then Griffith Joyner - first amazingly good, then suspiciously good, then dead at a suspiciously early age under the shadow of drug allegations.

God knows, they've tried hard enough to destroy the Olympics - the coaches and athletes colluding in a chemical race, stuffing bodies as full of alien hormones as any unfortunate, battery-reared animal.

The International Olympic Committee, which should uphold the probity of the tournament, allowed itself to become a corrupted and corrupting outfit, prostituting the Olympic dream for sex, for money, for petty power and big backhanders.

The drug-testing in Sydney is simultaneously heralded as the most sophisticated so far and a desperate recognition that the authorities need to be seen to be doing something about a betrayal of sport that has been allowed to proliferate for too long.

The real shame is not that drugs are hard to find, but that it took the IOC so long to take their duty as anti-doping monitor seriously. We will probably never see another Olympics without the shadow of drugs.

I'm not naive enough to think that you can simply "clean up sport" for good, although a stronger public commitment from athletes themselves might help.

Really, the more you think about it all, it should be time to give up getting excited about Sydney. But then again, that American sprinter Marion Jones is an exciting prospect and there will be an unfeasibly small gymnast from some benighted country flying higher and further than anyone else.

So maybe we will make an effort to watch just once or twice. Maybe this time, the gold will be real. We will always need that hope, however hard they fall.

- INDEPENDENT