Page 14 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • March 5, 2014 It’s time to laugh at the joke Olympics Here’s a question. How to you judge an event objectively when abstractions are involved? I say you pick a judge who has no financial, racial, or political motivation to support one side over another and then observe the response. I nominate my wife. She loves the Olympics. When the figure skating events came up, she tuned in to see if Mao Asada from Japan would be able to trump Yuna Kim from the Republic of Korea for the gold medal. Asada, the silver medalist last time around, had a fall in the short program that left her out of medal contention. Kim, the gold medalist last time, stayed on her feet. Her short program was excellent – and left her in first place, and her long program was sublime. My wife and I agreed that she had the gold medal locked up. The judges then gave the gold to Adelina Sotnikova, a Rus- sian skater who dropped in from outer space and gave a per- formance where she stayed on her feet, but came nowhere close to Kim, and nowhere close to Asada minus the fall. She was barely in the range of Ashley Wagner, an American woman who never got on the podium. Wagner skated well, and did not fall, but finished behind other skaters who stumbled or fell during their programs. She also criticized the judging. “The fix is in,” I said. Oddly enough, people better qualified than I am came to the same conclusion. Dick Button and Katerina Witt, both of whom earned two Olympic gold medals, both said that the Russian woman was a capable skater but that Kim had been robbed. Neither of them is a Korean and I suspect that Button and Witt know more about figure skating than my wife and I do. I suspect they are also more objective than the judges -- four of them Russian -- who gave the Russian girl an outrageously inflated score and deftly covered the fact that the United States and Finland both trashed Russia in ice hockey. But that is Sports Biz -- and that is also why the Olympics have always been a farce. The modern Olympics were invented to get young Frenchmen to take an interest in athletics. Baron Coubertin, who promoted the Olympics, was worried because young Frenchmen spent their time stalking women as opposed to ball games, running, fox hunting, gymnastics, and sword fighting. English boys routinely played sports where bloody noses were common and broken bones were not unknown. They loved shooting things that generally could not shoot back. Upper-class Germans wore facial armor to protect their noses and eyes, but exposed their cheeks and chins and lashed at one another with swords during their university years, eager to scar their faces and impress the girls, which is certainly barbaric but great training for old-fashioned wars. They later fought pistol duels over everything from dimly suspected attempts at adultery to insults against their proficiency at the bureaucratic office. It may seem laughable today, but this is the nation that took on most of Europe, plus Japan and the United States, and almost won. “I have fought the fathers and the sons, and I can tell you, the fathers were better fighters,” the Soviet Marshal Timosh- enko said during World War II, speaking of World War I. Barbarians are good to have on your side. The French did some dueling, too, sometimes with fatal results in pistol duels. But the baron wanted to rebronzer (“re-bronze”) the upper-class youth of France. The results were a flop: The French fought with magnificent courage in World War I, so much so that they decimated their own upper- and upper-middle classes, but the Anglo-Saxons and Germans continued to dominate the Olympics. The French across the board still like to chase women, but they also have great respect for intelligence, and intelligent people are generally not infatuated with sports, though they pretend they are once they go into politics, especially in the United States, where they need to get elected by people whose ancestors couldn’t make it in Europe. Want to try running for president of the United States if you admit that baseball and basketball are boring and that football and boxing are brutal and stupid? You will not get into the White House, though you might do the country a power of good if you did. The country needs a fair minimum wage, an end to cigarette smoking, and a clear understanding that entitle- ment programs are limited to long-term military veterans or people who have paid taxes their whole lives, not to needy folks from other lands who do not want to speak English and come from places where the politicians are even more crooked than they are here. Crooked politics are not a desirable export. Crooked politics, however, have always been part of the Olympics. Jim Thorpe, an American Indian, was hailed as the greatest athlete in the world by Europeans after the 1912 Olympics. The Americans stripped him of his Olympic medals because he once played semi-pro sports to make pocket money. The fantasy was that American Indi- ans were an inferior race destined to disappear, which explained the federal failure to honor our treaties with the Indian tribes. Thorpe took the hit for being the greatest athlete in the world at a time in history when his relatives were supposed to be degenerates or primitives. They were not then and they are not now. Speaking of Nazi-like hokum, doctored documentaries show Hitler stomping out of the 1936 Olympics because Jesse Owens, a black man, won so many medals compet- ing against the “Master Race.” In fact, Owens remem- bered that Hitler had waved to him in a friendly way and that Owens had waved back. Nazi ideology had no grudge against Africans as long as they stayed out of Europe. Hitler remarked that Africans lived on their feet with- out the debilitating influence of chairs and had a natu- ral advantage in short sprints, and should have their own Olympics. The ultimate Nazi propaganda film by Veit Harlan, now banned in Germany, features a black man as one of the surprise good guys. The same Nazi film industry doted on the Irish, the Boers, and the American Indians. Owens’ major gripe with the Olympics was not Hit- ler’s manufactured snub, but that Owens had to ride the freight elevator to his testimonial dinner in New York City Cabaret Night because blacks were not allowed on the passenger elevator. He was not amused. Kim got more of the same. She was a soft target because she came from a smaller country and the Russians were the hosts of the Olympics this time. Vintage Olympics politics: In 1936 it was no secret that Hitler and his gang of perverts, inverts, murderers, and thugs were institutional anti-Semites but the Olympic Committee chose to overlook that. Two years before, the Nazi government had murdered several hundred people under the pretext of homosexuality or of treason. Some of the people who were murdered were neither sexually per- verse nor communists. In fact, Gustav von Kahr and his wife were killed because Kahr opposed Hitler’s ludicrous attempt to take over Bavaria in 1923. Hermann Ehrhardt, Germany’s top anti-communist in 1919-22 -- but a Christian, a monarchist, and not an anti- Semite -- was another Hitler opponent. Ehrhardt had to make feet for Switzerland. He was 54 and he must have been in great shape -- or perhaps nobody wanted to catch up to a guy credited with 300 political murders, none of them based on religious or racial factors. The bomb that almost killed Hitler 10 years later detonated on Ehrhardt’s wife’s 50 th birthday. Paul Schultz, a right-wing killer of communists in Ehrhardt’s private army, was intensely homophobic and not an anti-Semite. He was shot in the back by a Nazi death squad, got back up while they were looking for a blanket to cover his “corpse,” and made it all the way to Greece, where he married and had a son. Waldemar Pabst, who had Jewish in-laws, had long since escaped Hitler, whom Pabst considered insane and mediocre. The Olympic Committee ignored the murders, the attempted murders, and the narrow escapes all these impressive anti-Nazi Germans experienced just two years earlier, along with the abundant and disgusting Nazi abuse of the law-abiding German Jews, and the slaughter of the bemused Nazi Party loyalists, and chartered the 1936 Olympics anyway. The Germans won more medals than any other athletes. None of them were for political probity or integrity. What happened to Kim is part of the same picture: Go with the Big Numbers. Russia is bigger than the Republic of Korea, the Russians are hosting the event, and they needed to cover their losses in ice hockey. But this does not work. My wife is a stalwart opponent of the “comfort woman” monuments now being stimulated by Chinese operatives in America. She is also a survivor of some of the U.S. iron bomb raids on Tokyo in 1944, though she missed the raid that burned her family’s house and killed many thousands of civilians in March of 1945. She is not a secret agent of Korea. She saw the same skating event I saw. Kim won fair and square, the Russian judges faked a Russian victory, and the whole thing was a fraud. Give Kim the medal she earned or cancel the next Olympics. In-house performers from the Wyckoff Family YMCA practicing for a cabaret-style show led by the production team of Reegan McKenzie and Tim Santos (directors) and Georgianna Pappas (musical director). Top row: Tiffany Terrell, Kate Revell, Geor- gianna Pappas, and Brianne Wright. Middle row: Julie Zier, Maria Eleftheriadis, Miriam Steinberg, Ronald Fraioli, Michael Aroneo, and Dan Fontana. Bottom row: Aaron Noriega, LouAnn Salkin, Carol Ann Mejury, and Amanda Aiello. For informa- tion about upcoming performances, call (201) 891-2081 or visit wyckoffymca.org. (Photo courtesy of Laura Toth.)