Fabrizio Mejia Madrid: Olympics

I will enjoy watching the Paris Olympics on television like anyone else. But I put the “k” in the title of this text because of capitalism, crisis and catharsis, which in German or Greek are all written with a “k.” I also think of Kafka and his character. Why? It occurred to me after reading what Jules Boykoff, a professor at the University of the Pacific in Oregon and former professional soccer player, says. Following Naomi Klein’s idea that capitalism resorts to environmental, health, military, or financial catastrophe to impose, as a shock, restrictions that only benefit the famous 0.1 percent of the world’s population, Boykoff portrays the other side: celebration as a valid reason for applying them. In addition to the great television spectacle in which flags and characters compete, which we think we know even though we only see them jump, swim or run, the Olympics are, in this view, a set of partnerships between global corporations and national states that “are paid for with public money and whose benefits are only private.” Just like a royal wedding or the Oscars. According to Professor Boykoff, this can be called “celebratory capitalism,” and it was consolidated only in 2012, with the London Olympics, where the state of exception in the city, the repression of any dissent, and the complicity of the media, gave free rein to the most vile commercialism, the omnipresent control of monopolistic brands of sports clothing, energy drinks and automobiles, together with the appropriation of foreign discourses such as sexual diversity or environmental sustainability.

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