Last week, as Chinese authorities cut off Tibet from the outside world and brutalized its people, Major League Baseball announced plans for the second World Baseball Classic in the spring of 2009. This page's favourite game is moving in the right direction in distancing itself from the five-ring circus, albeit I wish it was moving consciously. MLB unfortunately felt obligated to bring the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres to Beijing for a couple of spring training games, as baseball, having been voted out of the Summer Games by the Eurocentric International Olympic Committee last year, makes its final Olympic appearance in China this summer.
This page doesn't see Baseball suffering from the lack of Olympic exposure. Soccer does just fine with its own global showcase, The World Cup. The Games of Beijing are poised to be a social and environmental catastrophe, and if there are no boycotts in the offing, at least very few people are going to be aware that baseball is being played at them. From the myopic rhetoric being spouted by Jacques Rogge about the Olympics not being political, it's obvious that the IOC has learned nothing from Berlin 1936, Mexico City 1968, or Moscow in 1980 about how the Olympics are used by brutal totalitarian regimes to legitimize themselves. They also never learned how African nations helped to bring about the collapse of South Africa's Apartheid regime by boycotting the Montreal Olympics in 1976.
Unfortunately, this page doesn't see the IOC learning anything from Beijing either. The Winter Games in Vancouver in 2010 and London's 2012 Summer Games will be used to claim that the Olympic ideals were right all along, and the cycle of hypocrisy will just renew itself. At least one major sport won't be taken for the ride next time around, and this page hopes that Baseball will realize how lucky they are.
No comments:
Post a Comment