My wife and I watch too much of the Olympics. We are both taken with the healthy, young, lithe bodies of both the male and female athletes. I have my misgivings. Aside from the fact that I don't like to watch an authoritarian country aggrandizing itself, I also don't like the empty headed commentators who remark that such and such a swimmer is having an off swim only, a few seconds later, having to greet with a sense of glee the fact that the swimmer broke a world's record. Or, worse, complaining that the swimmer should not break a world's record if it sapped energy that should be reserved for the final. How many people can claim they have held a world's record, even for only a day?

I also like the beach volleyball, though I think the commentators work too hard to make sure that everyone knows that the women teams, while made up of close friends, are made up of people who are married to members of the opposite sex and are planning to have children, which provides presumptive proof that they are not lesbians. I am even getting to see the point of beach volleyball, how difficult it is to run around on the sand and the strategy involved in winning a match by sizing up the strengths and weaknesses of the opponents. I don't, though, see the point of synchronized diving, another of those sports graded on style rather than on achieving some goal like putting a little or big ball into or across a net. Beach volleyball is a sport while synchronized diving is not a sport. Yes, it also shows off butts  but it treats the means a sport uses to accomplish its goal of scoring points into an end in itself, while in what I regard as true sports, the aesthetics are just a means to an end. You don't get a run for a beautiful swing. The same criticism applies to gymnastics, however over glorified that sport has become, not least because you see these mutant young women and don't want to imagine that your daughter might have grown up (or been kept from growing up) to compete. Yes, all athletes strain and mutilate their bodies as a byproduct of training and competition, but in gymnastics we are supposed to groove on it, to regard those bodies as aesthetically pleasing. So I look forward to the later competitions, those of track and field, that have recently begun, where people try to outrace one another or throw a discus farther than one another. Those, after all, were the original Olympic sports. I wish we went back to just those and dumped basketball and other team sports that are familiar from other venues as well as those style sports that show up only at the Olympics. What the hey; maybe I am just being nostalgic for the television broadcasts of the Milrose Games that occurred in my youth when you got, close up, people taking a pole vault and saw the Wanamaker Mile. Track and field just do not cut it for a sports audience interested in team sports, where one team vies with another team, as opposed to competitions where people race to cover a distance faster and that way beat the other guy or girl.

And I am much taken with the doubtlessly very well planned visuals coming out of Peking courtesy of NBC. I get a travelogue that shows Tiananmen Square and bicycling through the Great Wall of China even though the number of set ups is very limited, whether as a result of politics or scarce (!) NBC resources, I don’t know. I also was taken with the shots of downtown Peking, what with its new buildings facing on four lane in each direction boulevards (not superhighways) that were the backdrop for the women’s marathon. The sight of the rowing course, its end hidden in mist, the coaches bicycling alongside the water, was an Impressionist painting rather than an Eakins rendition of rowing along the Schuylkill.

The indoor visuals were also stunning because they so completely captured the spirit of the places being portrayed. There is the torture chamber of gymnastics, the instruments always on view: the uneven bars which twist the wrists, the “saddle” so easy to miss, the balance beam so easy to fall off and, worst of all,  the flat pad for gymnastics, where going over the edge loses you so many style points you might as well give in, as if the point of the floor exercises was constraint rather than the liberty of bodies defying gravity, a point confirmed by the fact that the women athletes take those cutesy, formalized poses while they catch their breaths for the next set of somersaults. There is also the waterladden cube and the besanded beach volley arena, each one catching the spirit of its dominating element, just like a David Lean movie that focuses on sand or snow or Dickensian faces.

Most of all, I am taken with the visual representation of what, after all, is supposed to be the theme of every one of the Olympic pageants that now occur once every two years, once in winter and once in summer: the parade of nations and the competition of athletes caught up in a universal brotherhood that overcomes, for a brief moment, the national allegiance that is also promoted. Does the Olympic movement, in its visuals, transcend or confirm nationality and nationalism? For the most part, you recognize that a nation is confirmed as distinct because for the overwhelming number of countries nationality is defined around a national ethnicity. In the men’s 10,000 meter, you could, on my HD television, easily grasp the different shades of brown and the different facial configurations of the representatives of the different African delegations that dominate that race. Those nations where there is no single physical stereotype come complete with an explanation of why that is the case. Bermuda has both whites and blacks athletes, as reflects its history, and Saudi Arabia has no women, as reflects its beliefs. There is the startling knowledge that a white girl swimmer, Mary Coventry, is representing Zimbabwe. It turns out that she is, as the official Zimbabwe expression goes, “based outside the country”, which means trains and stays in the United States, while other athletes who are just attending American universities are not said to be based outside the country. American athletes, not so much by the way, remain distinctive in that you cannot point to a single physical type that is stereotypically American. There are people with Polish, Russian, and Jewish names that compete for America. There are Valley Girls and Ghetto Girls. There are even some white players on the largely African-American basketball team. Ethnicity, it should be said not for the last time, does not define an American. Rather, it is allegiance to a written Constitution that promotes the protection of everyone who has been gathered here amongst us against the predations of a government which, like all governments, tends to intrude in the lives of its people more than is absolutely necessary for the preservation of its citizenry’s liberty and welfare. The visuals at the Peking Olympics shows that America is still a different sort of place.

Should political exiles or other people only tangentially associated with their country be allowed to represent their country of birth? A difficult question to answer that is akin to the question of whether athletes who have merely visited their host countries should be allowed to represent them, as is the case with the Brazilian athletes who represent Georgia. If regulations became too strict, then many of the world’s athletes would have to be reclassified as American, because this is where they live as well as train. In that case, there would be far fewer nations represented: the big powers and just a few other places that can manage their own sports system, such as Australia or France. But maybe the recognition of nations as only places for identification or as addresses which send out payment is the right way to think about what it means to be a nation in the twenty-first century. Aruba has its own flag and so is a nation, and has a seat at the United Nations, and in what other sense is it a nation? Its legal system is still Dutch dominated and its economy is entirely dependant on American tourists. Palestine has a flag and is a guest nation at the United Nations and sends a delegation to the Olympics. Maybe that is enough to allow a small nation to feel proud. Athletes are like mercenaries, adopting a flag of convenience if it provides them with the wherewithal to compete—or else, if you like a more optimistic view of the international situation, they are citizens of the world, simply picking out one or another homeport while they travel everywhere for their lives and their training. Maybe that is the way globalization will unfold, nationality a matter of nostalgia more than the source of distinctive ways of life each one confined by geography. Look at those wonderful Olympic buildings in Peking. They could have been built anywhere by the coterie of high quality architects who travel all around the world building anywhere for whoever can afford to build on a grand scale. O brave new world.