Synchronized Diving: The Perfect Beijing Sport
Winfield Myers • August 14, 2008 • Uncategorized
I’m as much a fan of the Olympics as the next guy, but events in China–including within the athletic events themselves–have robbed the Beijing games of much of their pleasure. It takes nothing away from Michael Phelps’s remarkable feats to note that the moral and political baggage of these Olympics is considerable, beginning with an opening ceremony that could have been directed by Leni Riefenstahl (check out the opening of the 1936 Berlin games).
The opening ceremonies were memorable for their emphasis on uniformity. A thousand identical drummers, a thousand identical dancers, a ventriloquist singing act: if this was China’s debutante ball, the message was a reminder that, whatever its antiquity or cultural achievements, its power rests in sheer numbers and uniformity. You Westerners’ old racist cliche was correct, it seemed to say: we really do all look alike.
Toss in the ongoing human rights violations, which Brent has addressed, and the efforts to keep this focused on sport become increasingly difficult.
Most noticeable to this viewer, however, is the ubiquity of synchronized diving in the nightly coverage. It strikes me that this new competition is somehow well suited to these particular games: they reduce the potential fame (or fall) of individuals by turning a formerly individualistic sport into less a team sport than a symbiotic relationship with another athlete. The goal is precisely to mask one’s individual performance so thoroughly that it is indistinguishable from one’s partner’s performance. It is less a demonstration of one’s Olympian skill and determination than the subsuming of one’s individualism in order to become not a team player but an identical twin.
Mike Lester of the Rome (Georgia) News-Tribune captures one side of this situation well:
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