News and Views
The first Youth Olympics is about to wrap up in Singapore and much fun and games were doubtless had by all involved. Yet the event leaves audiences and participating nations wondering: what's it all about, Jacques?
At first, sport was king, then as restrictions on numbers dictated that the very best youth in the world would not take part across all events and that some key nations would send representatives who were not the best they had to offer to the Youth Olympics, the IOC emphasised the cultural mission of bringing the world's youth together, the sport almost secondary, particularly when you consider that in some sports a blind eye was turned to international rules and Olympic conditions, in the interests of find a "fun format".
In swimming, that meant boys and girls racing together as they do in local mini-league competitions the world over, and it meant no time standards being observed: Eric the Eel was never able to race at the Olympic Games again as the IOC insisted on minimum standards that cut out the Erics and Eddie the Eagles of the world, but in Singapore, anything went, event two teens from Liberia racing in their underpants.
As the show drew to a close, the United States was 5th on the medals table, a world away from the leader China, on 28 golds, 15 silvers and five bronzes going into the last rush of competition. Reflective of the quality of sports programmes, the selection of youth, the pursuit of excellence, the world order of sport? Or reflective of the culture that I witnesses on a visit to China a decade ago, when in the course of half an hour I watched divers aged 8 to 10 leave the 10m platform just about every 10sec, with one unfortunate lad failing to move in time and being clobbered by the next boy down. He left the poolside alone and in tears, the coach's response a finger pointed at the changing room.
I watched, too, through red eyes streaming in a haze of chlorinated air, as two 50m pool loads of young children were put through their paces. When I mentioned the foul atmosphere, an official walked down on to the poolside, spoke to a portly woman on the deck, who looked up at the stands, grunted, threw open a tiny window 50cms wide at most and shrugged.
China has changed, is changing, will change again, but it lags yet in the race to reach standards of child welfare in sport that most of us would be happy with out west, as it were. China is not alone, of course, but the numbers pressed through the works are singular in the world, the nation alone in pressing so many, so fast to the helm of world sport.
The US, meanwhile, also finds itself behind Ukraine, Hungary and Azerbaijan, across all sports. The best American junior swimmers missed Singapore for several reasons, including: the numbers restriction imposed by the IOC; the narrow age restriction; and, in part, a feeling that the Youth Olympics ought not to be taken too seriously and certainly not viewed as a competition in which you do all you can within the rules to end up at the top of the heap.
Instead, American youth will raced this week at the Junior Pan-Pacific Championships in Hawaii. That event is equivalent to the European junior championships, long a birthing pool for youth talent but protected from the gaze of the world, expectations kept in perspective. The word "Olympic" carries weight. It carries expectation. It is synonymous with "the best of the best".
But not so in Singapore, where there were fine world-class efforts (of a kind replicated by many around the world who never made it to the YOG) at the helm of a tidal wave of participation. We assume that the youth of the world had a fine cultural experience that contributes to an understanding of and respect for their fellow men and women across the globe, in the same way that applies in myriad walks of life far from the world of sport.
United States Olympic Committee (USOC) chief executive Scott Blackmun told reporters in Singapore: "We looked at this as a developmental opportunity for some of our athletes who don't otherwise get the opportunity to compete internationally." Like a swimming world cup, then. That sort of thing. Except it carries the word "Olympic".
China won 11 golds in the pool, America 1. This from US chef de mission Leonard Abbey, 27: "High-performance sports plans are for five, six, seven years at a time. So with such short notice, some sports had moved halfway through their plan. The YOG was never in the plan." And the question is: should it be? It will be fascinating to see how many of those Chinese champions of Singapore step up in London and Rio.
Abbey noted the intensity of the Russian gymnastics team in Singapore. "The coaches are comparing it to the highest levels of competition that they've competed in, and so are the athletes," he noted.
It is nothing new, of course, to find young athletes at the helm of world sport, and swimming, particularly among women, boasts a history of 14-16-year-olds who beat the world at the Olympics proper, while the likes of Phelps and Thorpe are examples of young men racing in Olympic finals as teens - and winning.
The question, however, does not focus on the handful of young, extraordinary talents and how and when they may break through to senior sport in a way that allows them to take a long-term view of their sporting careers and lives in general, health being paramount in that equation.
The IOC carries particular responsibility now that it has launched a youth race in a world where pride will out. Abbey gave a hint that the US now feels under pressure to turn the heat up for future Youth Games, telling reporters in Singapore: "The YOG's up there as far as top priority. Having a better understanding of the level will help us to improve our planning for the future and fitting it into high-performance plans."
And that pressure is being put on nations by none other than International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge himself, who said that he was not concerned about the quality of the American team. He told the Associated Press: "When people don't participate, they are easily forgotten and they do not weigh on the success of the organisation."
How easily he forgets the 80s boycott years, when the absence of one set of countries one year and then the absence of another set of countries four years definitively weighed on the organisation, whose showcase events in 1980 and 1984 are coloured in asterisks. Mary T Meagher, Tracy Caulkins, Brian Goodell - easily forgotten? Come off it Jacques.
Interesting, though, that he should think the IOC as beyond being weighed down by the stuff of mortals, the real world, the pain of exclusion or inclusion. What he means by organisation, of course, is not the athletes but the officials who will be there come what may, the show, for better or worse, that still be there, the TV face of the Games.
When the key note in the song of things Olympic is not sung, however - the race to find the very best athlete in the world at one defined moment in the history in their given, and Olympic, sport - the term "Olympic" loses the ring of quality that is so important to its status as the world's finest sporting arena.
The new house that Jacques built, a wing of the Olympic Movement, sits on befuddling foundations: is it sport, is it culture, is it fun, is it all of those; where does the race to top the medals table - so important in the Olympic proper - truly fit into the picture; and is everyone happy about what goes into to making a young athlete a world-beater before their bodies have done developing?
