EDITORIAL – Olympic spirit low, no surprise

The Winter Olympics start today. Turin, the northern Italian city selected for the honor, is… The Winter Olympics start today. Turin, the northern Italian city selected for the honor, is abuzz with international good cheer and a healthy, competitive spirit. Those lucky enough to live in Turin and the surrounding area are joyfully sharing their city with the gleeful crowds of tourists. For a little more than two weeks, the world is able to come together and – peacefully – celebrate athleticism and sportsmanship.

Well, at least part of that is true. The Winter Olympics do start today. They are being held in Turin, which is in the north of Italy. There will be competitions and plenty of athletes.

However, there are plenty of people in Turin who don’t particularly feel like sharing the roads, especially since they’ve been putting up with traffic jams and construction work on their daily commutes. Some, angry about all of the rapid-fire expansion invading their picturesque city – including a high-speed railway between France and Italy – have gone so far as to stage protests. Three hundred of them were temporarily able to divert the procession of the Olympic flame, and last month four demonstrators actually grabbed the flame out of the hands of the athlete who was running with it.

And, really, given the increasing costs and decreasing benefits of holding the Olympic Games, who can blame them? Over the years, the Olympics have become little more than a festival of sponsorship and advertising. They have been over-expanded and over-commercialized; in their current, bloated form it’s unclear what purpose they even serve.

With Olympic stadiums in cities all over the world, the economic advantage and elite status that hosting the Games once implied are all but gone.

We live in an age when a Canadian can instantly e-mail a peer in China, and a German can watch Brazilian television from the comfort of his own home. We use the World Wide Web to interact with the global economy – it’s no shock that the thought of many nations coming together isn’t the ratings-draw it once was.

Then again, people may also just not be able to muster up the motivation to sit through endless commercials to watch a sport like speed skating or bobsledding. Even hockey, one of the Winter Olympics’ biggest draws, is generally acknowledged as a sport that does not televise well.

Ticket sales for the actual games have been sluggish for several Olympics now, too, indicating a more general indifference toward the Games. Nationalism isn’t what it was 20 or 40 years ago; World War II is over and the Iron Curtain has been down for some time now.

The forces America finds itself at odds with today do not represent themselves at Olympic Games – there’s not exactly a Team Terror for people to root against.

The world is a continually changing place. If the Olympics want to stay relevant, they need to change with it.