Like most people, I was captivated this week as Michael Phelps broke a 2,200 year record, as Simone Biles kicked ass and took names, and as Katie Ledecky made us all feel inferior when she literally made her dreams a reality. Like most people, I've had the Olympic Medal watch list set to send me notifications to my phone anytime the US won a medal, or any time one of the other big competitors, like China, Japan, Russia, or Germany, tried to outdo our country with the medal count. And like most people, I found myself jumping for joy when an American athlete brought home gold, or even silver or bronze; I felt such pride in my countrymen who were representing our country so proudly, so successfully. In fact, I was so enthralled by the competition between the big country competitors that I failed to realize that an athlete from Côte d'Ivoire won the country's first gold medal.
If you're a diligent human being, you just googled "Côte d'Ivoire gold medal" and you would see 0 results because Côte d'Ivoire has not won any gold medals because neither the people nor the government of Côte d'Ivoire are able to spend hundreds of thousand of dollars to raise an Olympic athlete like privileged first world countries like the US or China can. They're too busy trying to keep their country together after years of horrible dictators and successive wars.
But Côte d'Ivoire is a dramatic case. Ok, fine. But think about it; when was the last time you heard about Mongolia, or Thailand, or Singapore in the olympic news channels? Did you know that Tajikistan hasn't won a gold medal since 2008? Did you even hear that Majilinda Kelmendi won Kosovo's first ever gold medal?
No, you didn't. Because let's be totally real here for a second: the Olympics aren't about the entire world coming together in a show of solidarity and brotherly love to engage in friendly competition to reaffirm our foreign relations. Maybe it was years and years ago, but now it's just a way for rich Western countries to showcase their superiority and pat themselves on the back for beating their "frenemies" at sports.
I'm not denying the importance or the use of the Olympic games as a tool for relieving stress and tensions between heavily fighting countries. I recognize that we as a people need entertainment to distract us from our basic instincts and engage in all out warfare. I am also not diminishing the very talented athletes who train their whole lives for these games. And finally, I am not ostracizing those who love the Olympic games and look forward to them every four years. No, you are all great and good and justified in your love and dedication. What I AM saying, though, is that the Olympics are not for everyone, and we should stop advertising them as such.We should also recognize that they're not all that great.
We should recognize that a country like Brazil, which is already suffering from harmful political turmoil feels obligated to bid to be the host country for the Olympics in order to be taken seriously as a real international contender, even when they so clearly do not have the capacity to do so. We should recognize that the Olympics have been held exclusively in privileged, first world countries since their inception because underdeveloped countries aren't even given the chance to bid, let alone become a host. We should recognize that this seemingly universal competition that is supposed to bring the world together under a common cause, is so severely skewed towards the developed world that the underdeveloped world are at such a staggering disadvantage that they don't even bother sending anyone to the Olympics anymore, negating the main purported existence of the games.
