For most of three decades, sport writ large had avoided the whole conversation of who’s in and who’s out. This year, that conversation came back with a snarl
Once you start down this road, there is no easy way of backing out . The Paralympics has gone charging ahead, pulling the Olympics along with it. Eventually, everyone else will have to follow as well.
At the end of 2021, Paris 2024 was being sold as the return-to-normal Olympics after two dull, pandemic iterations. One of the brightest sporting moments in years was the short film Paris screened at the closing ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics. After three weeks of being masked, tested, tracked and shunted around like disease-ridden flesh sacks, here was a glimpse of life as it should be lived. People, together, in one of the world’s great cities, having fun. It was the promise of better times to come.
Now Paris 2024 will be a battleground for the soul of the Olympic movement. If Russia isn’t there, who else drops out? If Russia is there, will anyone else come? Or are we so deep into the Disney-fication of the Olympics that no one will care? What excuse will they have to compromise themselves this time?Right now, we’re back to to doing what we do best in the west – pretending.
Pretending that war happens over there, and that allowing our entertainments to continue uninterrupted isn’t just okay, but somehow brave.Eventually, reality gets in the way of pretending. Of all the things that happened in sports this year, the quiet return of reality was the one that made the greatest impact, though the full force of it may not arrive for a while yet.
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