Somewhere in the palatial offices of the International Olympic Committee in Lausanne, Switzerland, they missed something. Yes, they’ve awarded the successful bids: it’s Sochi, Russia, in the winter of 2014 and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in the summer of 2016. They finally got all nations signed on to having women recognized as athletes. That’s all good. But when it came down to the most basic quotient of the games – putting bums in seats – it appears the IOC brain trust has bobbled the baton. The commentators spotted it right away.
“Why are there so many empty seats?” one of them said, Sunday.
Valid question. In the first days alone, there were empty seats at the beach volleyball venue, the women’s soccer game in Coventry, the Olympic swimming pool, and astonishingly at the North Greenwich Arena where there was a battle royal going on among the Chinese, the British and the American gymnastics teams. And, if it wasn’t obvious for television viewers sitting in North America, it must have really irritated television viewers from right down the street in a Canadian sports bar, in London, known as The Maple Leaf.
“It really sucks,” one frustrated fan told the Toronto Star on Monday.
OK, there were nearly nine million tickets available to be purchased by Olympic fans around the world. And, to be fair, you can’t put a bum in every seat, but rows and rows of freshly painted seatbacks staring back at the Olympics cameras? That was embarrassing.
What’s more, it’s a clear message that the IOC, while it takes great pride in its success in selling the Olympic message, its popularity in attracting bids for both the winter and summer games, and its stratospheric surpluses, it can’t seem to connect with the common fan. And that’s principally because, I believe, it has no “common” sense at the top.
Those rationalizing for the IOC claim that the empty seats are the result of corporate sponsors not filling the seats with their executives, their employees and/or their suppliers. If so, shame on them for being no-shows! If it’s the dignitaries – the IOC’s elite guests or the sporting federations or public representatives, i.e. elected politicians, or (say it ain’t so) the Royal Family – double shame on them for not making use of the freebies! We spotted the Royal princes at gymnastics the other night on TV, so I guess the legacy of Princess Diana’s parenting survives. But throwing some of the thousands of handy troops into some of those front seats on camera looked a little obvious to me.
I can’t help thinking there’s a deeper problem here, something even Lady Di couldn’t possibly have overcome. That is, we fuss so often over the professional sports, we forget about the real athletes. We’re so conditioned to follow and faint over celebrity, that we fail to recognize those who deserve celebration right in our midst. I remember an incident in Edmonton, many years ago, when the Oilers (in the Gretzky, Messier glory years) ran up a string of Stanley Cups. I happened to be at the Edmonton International Airport when the team was arriving or departing and there was a minor riot when travellers in the airport recognized some of the pro hockey players and an autographing frenzy ensued.
Meantime, across the airport concourse, seven-time Trap World Championships gold-medalist and six-time Olympian, Susan Nattrass, walked through the concourse virtually unnoticed. At the time, Nattrass had been practising every day for a year, just to get to her competition. Even the Oilers in their heyday only practised from September to May. When I asked Nattrass how she felt about the contradiction, she just shrugged.
“Pro sports are still king,” she said. “I’ll never change that.”
She was right. She couldn’t. But it wasn’t up to her. It’s up to us. We have to learn to stop buying into the myth that a young man, who can do magic with a hockey stick, or jam a basketball net that’s barely over his head anymore, or smash a baseball out of the park, is an athlete. Or that accomplishing any of those feats requires his team (i.e. season’s ticketholders) to pay him double-digit millions per season to do it.
The true athletes are the ones who toil away for eight or twelve years on a meagre stipend just to get a crack at the top sixteen to get to the Olympics, or, if all the stars align, win a bronze, silver or gold medal during the Olympic Games. They’re the ones who deserve our adulation, and, damn it, our bums in seats for the privilege of witnessing their greatness. I say fill the empty seats with kids who need role models. I say fill the empty seats with amateur athletes’ parents, coaches and friends – who most often cannot afford the exorbitant IOC prices.
To borrow from Pierre, Baron de Coubertain, I say, “Swifter, higher, stronger… and fewer wasted empty seats.”