Sport and Politics: an Olympic history

Munich 1972 was the first Olympics I remember. Aged 8 I have hazy memories of Olga Korbut in the ring, Lasse Viren and Valery Borzov on the track, Mark Spitz in the pool and hooded men in the Village. The Palestinian involvement was an early indication to me the Olympics was about more than sport. In the middle of the Cold War, the US and USSR were once again battling for supremacy in Germany.

For half of the 20^th century, the US was best performed in the Olympic medal count but the Russians beat them in 1956 and 1960. As the space race intensified, the US regained control in the 1960s.  In Munich it was the turn of the USSR to come out ahead. Behind the Americans East Germany was running a very creditable third well ahead of their western rivals despite a population of just 16 million people. They rubbed salt in fellow German wounds with another home soil victory in the football World Cup two years later in the only time they would ever meet (West Germany lost that battle but won the war against the Dutch in the final).

With communist pride on the line, the 70s and 80s were the glory era of East German sport. The German College for Physical Culture produced the coaches, trainers and sports medicine personnel responsible for East Germany’s remarkable success. There was drugs and cheating but there was also genuine success. The problem was, as 1980 Olympic 110-metre hurdles gold medallist Thomas Munkelt said, “we ran our sports by the performance principle, but not our economy.”

The 1980 Olympics was East Germany’s high water mark. It was also the year any doubt the Olympics wasn’t political was wiped out with the west’s boycott over Afghanistan. Without the US, the East Germans ran second to the Russians. The Russians got revenge and boycotted Los Angeles in 1984. They cited “security concerns, chauvinistic sentiments and an anti-Soviet hysteria whipped up in the United States” but everyone knew it was tit-for-tat.

Ceausescu’s Romania was the one Communist Bloc country that ignored Chernenko’s directive and they finished second to the Americans in the medal count. 1984 was notable for another reason. Five years earlier, the IOC renamed the Republic of China to Chinese Taipei. With Taiwan downgraded, China would not lose face by competing for the first time since 1952. They finished a creditable fourth in their first outing. The Seoul Olympics in 1988 was the first truly global Olympics and the first since Montreal to feature the US and Soviets. East Germany were there too and they forced the Americans into third place. Other eastern bloc countries in the top ten were Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. The Chinese dropped to 11^th.  But East Germany’s second high water mark masked a rapidly changing tide.

The stunning collapse of Eastern bloc Communism meant the medal table would look radically different. The USSR fell in 1991 but there was still a strong “Unified Team” in Barcelona 1992 consisting of 12 of the old 15 Soviet republics. They were unified enough to win the most medals. It would be the last time Moscow would finish in front. East Germany was no more and China was back up to fourth behind the united Germany. There was still an East German clone in Barcelona as one of the last of the Communist countries Cuba finished fifth.

There was further change in the New World Order at Atlanta 1996. On home soil, the Americans beat the Russians for the first time since 1968. China stayed fourth but cut the gap on Germany as they were doing in the real world. In Sydney 2000, China beat Germany and got the same amount of medals as the hosts (58) but with 28 golds to Australia’s 16. At Athens, China went clear number two to the Americans. They got fewer medals than the Russians but as they did in Sydney, they knew how to get gold.

In Beijing they did to the Americans what they did to the Russians four years before. The US had 110 medals to China’s 100 but it was 51-36 to the hosts in golds. China’s remarkable powerhouse economic advance was on display in Beijing and the last four years have accelerated the trend. It will be no surprise, even without home advantage, they get more medals and golds than anyone else in London.

They have won the first gold of the 2012 London Olympics (though arguably that honour belongs to Specsavers). Top-ranked Yi Siling of China won the women’s 10-metre air rifle at Royal Artillery Barracks on Saturday. Another Chinese woman, Yu Dan won the bronze. If the 21^st century becomes the Asian century, then the place to watch for proof will be the Olympic Medal tally. It won’t be too long before the likes of India and Indonesia become the new East Germany – but getting the economics right as well as the sport.

Weeping for monsters: North Korea’s dynastic dues

I’ve been thinking all week about the hysterical sobbing in those images of North Koreans mourning Kim Jong-il. Was it group hysteria? Was it pretend-crying just to avoid looking different to everyone else? Was it stage-managed or was it genuine for a leader who was a daily presence? Maybe it was grief for loved ones dead in famines or just their own miserable luck to live in such an accursed place? Was it fear that things could get worse under Kim Jong-un? Was it simply just a great chance to cry uncontrollably and not look out of place?

The ambiguities in the tears have defined North Korea since the end of World War II. When the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea began in the northern part of the peninsula in 1946 it was faced with two big problems. The North had always been more remote and less developed and two million fled south to avoid the Communist DPRK. The three-year war that followed left the new country in tatters.

North Korea became a centrally planned economy which strangled small business. Dissent was not tolerated and all good was embodied in leader Kim Il-sung. Il-Sung promoted “Juche” as a concept of self-reliance to make do in difficult times. He said Juche meant man was the master of everything and decided everything. That man was him and he mobilised the entire workforce to industrialise North Korea rapidly after the civil war.

Suspicious of the South, they built up military might to deter invasion. They ran up massive debts to the USSR, China and Japan. By 1980 they defaulted on loans and the economy has been contracting ever since. The collapse of Soviet Communism left Russia unimpressed with its poverty-stricken debtor. DPRK increasingly relied on China as its only open border. Il-sung refused to consider Gorbachev’s perestroika because he knew it led to glasnost. He died in 1994 and first son and heir apparent Kim Jong-il took over.

Born in 1942, Jong-il spent his first years in Siberia with his parents. His father commanded the 1st battalion of the 88th Brigade, a Red Army unit of Chinese and Korean exiles. Jong-il was born in Vyatskoye, a fishing village near Khabarovsk where the railway turns south to Vladivostok. As a schoolboy, Jong-il was interested in politics and Marxist literature. He learned English in Malta and in 1980, was effectively head of the politburo with only his father above him. He inherited his father’s personality cult and was named head of the armed forces in 1991. With Jong-il making all the decisions since they defaulted on their debts, North Korea’s economy collapsed.

When Il-Sung finally died in 1994 aged 82, Jong-il was undisputed leader. The US were worried by his nuclear ambitions and threats to leave the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. The countries signed an Agreed Framework as one of Jong-il’s first achievements in office. It allowed the DPRK to continue developing nuclear technology at foreign expense but with light water reactors rather than the nuclear proliferating graphite reactors they already had.

The US overplayed its hand. President Clinton rashly assumed North Korea was on the verge of collapse. Congress would not pass a bill to end the trade embargo in place since the Korean War and the US dragged its feet in calling for tenders to build the new reactors. By October 2002, the US believed North Korea had an enrichment program and confronted them with their evidence. Three months later North Korea left the NNPT. The subsequent Six Party talks were fruitless. North Korea went rogue.

While nuclear testing proceeded with Iranian and Pakistani know-how, the fate of the North Korean people worsened. Jong-il oversaw a collapse in industry and technology while floods and storms in 1995 wrecked electricity and health infrastructure and destroyed harvests. Hungry peasants ate what undeveloped crops survived and the country could no longer feed itself. Women and children bore the brunt of the death toll of a million or more in three years.

Food from China, South Korea and the US eased the situation until Jong-il refused overseas aid in 2002. Inclusion in Bush’s 2002 State of the Union “Axis of Evil” heightened North Korea’s isolation. Famine conditions worsened again. Escapees told the BBC starvation was common with homeless people dying in railway stations, and others too weak to beg. Complaining about this would lead to instant imprisonment.

Imagine the logical leaps of doublethink North Koreans must take in order to make sense of their world. Death is all around them but so is a regime that demands obedience and Juche. Even when people were confronted by evidence of the regime’s failures, their total reliance on state media meant foreign powers and the evil South were made scapegoats. The scenes in Pyongyang after Jong-il’s death are not without precedent. The public lamentation resembles the carefully choreographed mourning after Kim Il-sung died. Life seemed almost too unbearable to go on without Dear Leader. But just as in 1994, the state machinery will swing into action after a decent interval and the leadership cult will shift to Kim Jong-un. The world should learn from Clinton’s mistake. North Korea can survive despite dysfunction. Bellies may remain empty but the belicose dynasty of Dear Leader will continue. As the handpicked factory worker in the sobbing video said “I will change sorrow into strength and remain faithful to Comrade Kim Jong-un.” It’s best North Koreans cry now because it will not be tolerated in six months time.

Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom

A little-known researcher in Moscow’s Gorbachev Foundation has done the world an extraordinary favour when he smuggled secret 1980s Politburo papers out of Russia. Last week Pavel Stroilov published documents that revealed the leaders of the Western World were lying when they said they wanted a united Germany. Stroilov copied more than 1,000 transcripts of Politburo discussions before they were sealed off. Among the many astonishing details are a meeting between Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher where the British PM said he should pay no attention to Nato communiqués. The reality was that Britain and France (and presumably the US too) feared a united Germany even more than the red menace in Moscow. (picture: AP)

The Telegraph noted Thatcher herself alluded to the Moscow lie in her 1993 autobiography when she said she was “apprehensive” about the prospect of a united Germany. Spiked’s Marxist writer Mick Hume says the revelations should only be a shock to those who take “the anti-Soviet statements of Western leaders at face value.”

Hume points to a human failing: the tendency to believe what we see or hear. Information is a valuable commodity but a dangerous one too and it hardly surprising the Russians (like those in power in the West) place an embargo on sensitive government records until well after the events have taken place and the participants are either retired or dead. Now that this is in the public sphere it has changed from tacit to explicit knowledge. It can be taken from place to place, it can be internalised, and it can become personal knowledge. Knowledge transfer is a learning process and relies on wide dissemination of information.

It is the role of the world’s media to provide that information fully and fairly. As soon as an English translation is available, Stroilov’s thousand documents should be published in full either in print or online. But as the great 19th century journalist Lincoln Steffens found out, some information would never be printed. Steffens was idealistic but would never report on police brutality or political corruption because the complaints were coming from “faddists: co-operators, socialists (a few), anarchists, whom nobody would listen to.” By nobody, he meant his editors, wealthy readers and the city’s elite.

Arguments about what information should be in the public domain are complicated by the push to start charging for online content. The push goes against the grain of those who believe “information should be free”. Jeff Jarvis is one of the most strident voices against paying for content. He says it is costly, it impacts branding, there are other free sources and perhaps most important it takes “the content out of the conversation.” No one can talk about something they cannot see.

Jarvis is also a big fan of the power of Googlejuice and that company’s CEO has his own view of whether information is worth paying for. Eric Schmidt told a group of British broadcasting executives last week that general news publishers would find it hard to charge for their content online because too much free content is available. Schmidt agreed with the commonly-held opinion that the information had to have niche value such as business news to work.

People will pay for information they think is profitable. As American essay and programming language designer Paul Graham wrote this month, consumers never really paid for content and publishers never really sold it either. Graham says the price of books, music and movies depends mostly on the format and there is no additional charge for quality or quantity. The content is irrelevant. Selling information is a business distinct from publishing, says Graham. Those who can’t sell their content must give it away and make money indirectly or embody it in things people will pay for.

Graham says giving news away is the future of most current media. Those in the business are slow to accept this conclusion. Meanwhile it is giving every indication of a business in crisis. Newspaper jobs have fallen from more than 450,000 in 1990 to fewer than 300,000 today. Jarvis calls the media the first “post-industry.” But as communications theorist Dennis McQuail wrote, the Information Society so beloved of Jarvis has no core political purpose, just an inevitable logic of its own, with an ideological bias towards free market outcomes.

Stroilov’s documents don’t fall into the niche business content category. No-one is going to make money from knowing what went on in secret Kremlin meetings in 1989. But they contribute greatly to public knowledge about the mendacity of leaders, the problems of ideology and the course of history. Gorbachev and Thatcher were unable to stop the Berlin Wall from falling, and the West could not stop Germany from re-uniting. Despite such diversions that followed such as the Wars on Drugs and Terror, the fall of Communism would eventually reveal the West’s true preoccupation – making money.