Augusto Manzanal Ciancaglini
Political scientist
During the last Olympic Games in Paris there was no Olympic truce as in ancient Greece, but not only in relation to active conflicts, but also in relation to other forms of war, which are filtered through a twisted and multifocal complexity that translates as geopolitical competition.
While some live the Olympic Games as an oasis of universal fraternity through sport and others continue to measure them by the economic losses of the organizers (since Tokyo 1964 these events have been dragging an average deficit of 2,000 million dollars and only three editions have been profitable in recent years: Los Angeles 1984, Atlanta 1996 and Sydney 2000), in the middle, between idealism and materialism, China and the United States competed on a very equal footing, distancing themselves from the rest.
The United States, which leads the historical medal tally with more than 1,000 gold medals, is chased by China, a country that barely exceeds 300. However, this time they ended up tied with the same number of gold medals, although the American athletes ended up winning the silver and bronze medals. Thus, many are already taking the opportunity to identify this fierce and evenly matched competition as a representation of the entire image of the rivalry between the two powers.
The truth is that the tension between States has been very present in these sporting events; during the Cold War the two superpowers used the Olympic stage to reflect the superiority of their systems.
China, since Mao Zedong, has placed great importance on sport and has invested in thousands of state factories of Olympic medalists. Although some things have been relaxed about these human commodities, given that Chinese athletes sometimes seem to possess the underhanded spontaneity of one who strives for himself and not for a government, their ubiquitous athletic prowess, garnished with exaggerated propriety and politeness, reflects that the main objective is to project a positive image of an entire society in the form of propaganda, which ends up dragging them to an omnipresent impersonal podium; the result is that of an unknown soldier impossible to admire, at least for Westerners.
The 2008 Beijing Olympics were nothing less than “China’s coming-out party”. Yet the world is still waiting to really get to know China, starting with the Chinese themselves. In any case, this lack of understanding may be working as a propellant, as the rivalry with the United States is rekindled.
While athletes and fans are immersed in romanticism and many analysts insist on getting bogged down in the tangible. The United States, carrying an increasingly heavy medal, picks up all this and jumps to the imperialist realism that offers and receives perplexity among the dust of chaos.
In the race, the silhouette of Beijing’s allies is shrinking in the ostracism that links huge Russia with tiny North Korea; at the same pace, the irrelevance of the Western satellites is taking shape.
In this leap to the full China will not catch up with the United States by obtaining more medals, but by ceasing to produce political and cultural uniformity, that is to say, by becoming less Chinese.
