I'm not a sports fan, so I've been ignoring the Winter Olympics unless I'm on a treadmill in front of it, but I'm hearing stuff about it. Beer-colored drinking water, grass being spray-painted green by groundskeepers. Tales of toilets with the lid and seat inverted, toilets bundled two to a stall, toilets wholly missing from the restroom. Sochi Fails, in other words.
While most coverage seems to be on the events themselves, there's a lot of buzz about these failures, or why these games are so important to Russia, or more particularly why each malfunction is a blow to Putin - Fox News in particular seemed to focus on that angle. They're not the only critics, of course, and Vanity Fair takes a look at the sort of corruption and danger beneath the games, while a guy on CNN is shocked that Russia didn't feature an apologetic nod towards its totalitarian past during the games' opening ceremonies.
What struck me was the difference between these reports and the controversies surrounding the Beijing Olympics... wow, six years ago already? Perhaps it's a matter of fading memories, but I don't remember quite as much focus on critical coverage. Yes, China has a problem with press freedom. And political freedom. And ethnic or religious minorities' freedoms. And yes, various groups protested all of this during the lead-up to the Beijing games. But I can't recall this sort of schadenfreude we're seeing at Sochi - perhaps because the Chinese did a better job installing toilets? Or maybe the journalists weren't allowed to share the malfunctions?
The Council of Foreign Relations website has a neat retrospective of past Olympics, and how they've almost always been political. States can boycott them as a way of thumbing their nose at the host country, athletes can spark controversy over which country they want to represent, protestors might be massacred outside the stadium, and so forth. Sochi isn't new by any means, but I think it's a bit different.
With China, there wasn't really a face to be attached to the games, no central figure whom everyone had to please or be thrown in the shark tank. The country was - and is - a one-party system ruled by a post-ideological elite. Names rise to prominence and may occasionally be recognized by people who don't study the country for a living, but tend to signify trends in the ruling party's thought. Russia meanwhile is an increasingly illiberal one-party democracy dominated by a political machine in turn dominated by a single man. These developments are recent, unlike the half-century China has spent in its current unfortunate state, and since we have Putin as the focal point for all that is wrong about the New Russia, we can entertain the notion that without him we could see a better New Russia.
So that's one theory, that the Sochi criticism is sharper than the Beijing controversy because the current crop of critics feel a better chance of success. A competing hypothesis would be that it depends on America's relations with the country in question - we're much less reliant on Russian exports or markets than we are on China, obviously, so perhaps economic interests blunted criticisms of China. Or maybe time is the bigger issue, and China being a repressive totalitarian state isn't as newsworthy as Russia's backslide into authoritarianism, which is only a decade or two old.
Might be a research project in there somewhere. Though I still wouldn't end up watching the games themselves, only the world's responses to them, I'd argue that would be more meaningful than who won the gold medal in which event.
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