Opinion

Official Olympics Doggerel (?)

By DOUGLAS LUMMIS

Skiing is my favorite sport. In fact it is one of my favorite activities. I was raised partly in the mountains of California, where there was a ski slope right outside our back door. Having skis attached to my feet came to seem as natural as wearing shoes.

I also love competitive skiing. Actually I used to be pretty good at it. I skied on the University of California, Berkeley, team for three years in the late 1950s.

The intercollegiate races were marvelous fun, and we got to be good friends with the racers on the other teams. But nobody ever came to watch: Skiing was not a spectator sport. We were our own audience; that is, we would watch each other. After all, the person best qualified to appreciate the spectacle of someone dancing through the gates of a slalom course is the person who has just been through that course, or who is just about to go. We didn't care much about the opinion of anyone else.

Since then competitive skiing has become a big-money spectator sport, largely as a result of the big-money promotion of the Winter Olympics. I remember when, in 1960, the Winter Olympics came to California, to a resort where we used to ski all the time called Squaw Valley. This was my first opportunity to see the dreary ugliness of Olympic development. Squaw Valley, once a lovely mountain valley, had already been partly uglified by the resort. But it still had a certain tastefulness and local flavor. With the coming of the Olympics, mountain meadows were turned into parking lots and all sorts of tawdry, modern, concrete buildings were built hastily. I haven't been back there since.

The Olympics has come to be less a competition between athletes than a competition between developers. Sponsoring the Olympics amounts to inviting the big-money developers to your town. When they arrive they do what developers always do: destroy what is there and build something else, changing "someplace" into "anyplace."

Have you seen what they did to Nagano Station?

In 1993 I wrote a poem in this column to celebrate the decision to bring the Olympics to Nagano. I offer it again here as a candidate for the Official Nagano Olympics Doggerel (There is an Official Beer, so why not an Official Doggerel?).

HARK, HARK

Hark, hark,

The dogs do bark:

Olympics are coming to town,

With flags and tags and money bags

And rivers turning brown.

They'll build a thousand parking lots

And shiny white hotels,

And carve the mountains down to size,

And sell whatever sells.

And for one great glorious moment

All the world will know

That up there in the mountains is

A place called Nagano.

And when that moment's over

The tourists will come back,

With lots of foreign currency

Hidden in their packs,

And stay in shabby grey hotels

With dripping rusty cracks.

They'll speak in leaking lobbies

Of the region's former fame:

"I hear this place was lovely once,

Before the Olympics came."

Shukan ST: Feb. 6, 1998

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