Uncommon Commentary #20: Error of Olympian Magnitude

The Olympics have deviated far from their original purpose. It was natural that the athletes of ancient Greece would desire to test themselves, first, versus their own standards of physical attainment; second, versus the best athletes from their own city-states; and third, versus the best from the other polities of that civilization. Every four years, therefore, they gathered on the plain of Olympia to determine where they ranked in the Greek world. The reason for the modern revival of this institution, in 1896, was to add a fourth level of competition: versus the top athletes even from other nations. My point is that the rivalry in ancient olympiads, and perhaps in the earliest modern ones, was between athletes, not between the states from which they happened to come; the games were never intended as fierce nationalistic struggles, with teams representing the USA battling teams representing Uruguay or wherever else, and the press keeping track of which "country" leads the "medal count." That, however, is precisely what they've become.
(It could be argued that the politicization of the Olympics has value, since, it is often said, the fact that Black athlete Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the 1936 Summer Olympic Games in Berlin "destroyed Hitler's theories of racial supremacy".  It could not, however, be argued correctly. Undoubtedly Hitler was displeased at Owens' physical feats, but the Führer had always allowed that peoples whom he deemed inferior could produce extraordinary individuals, and the fact that Germany “won” that olympiad—see above—must have, in the opinion of many, validated the Third Reich’s racist ideology.)