SPORTS: The tour de Framce, the Olympics

A favorite act of a well-known comedian was to play "The Lost Chord" on a grand piano.  He would open up the piano and tear it apart, looking for the lost chord. I felt like that this morning when I was searching literally through thousands of e-mails looking for Dick Payne's defense of the Tour de France. I found it, Eureka! Incidentally, I am happy to report that his good wife Pat is back home after recovering from her accident in Winchester, England. On the other hand, I am sorry to report that Jim Tent is entering hospital for a serious operation.  I wished him good luck in the name of WAIS.  Dick will forgive me if I am unconvinced by his defense of the Tour de France:

"The Tour de France, said to have attracted more spectators than any other sport and to be the most strenuous of all, has been characterized as 'idiotic' in this space, and it would be enlightening to know by what criteria the judgement was made, surely not by the fact that drugs and commercialization have tainted this sport for all popular sports seem to have undergone the same fate. Are golf and tennis equally absurd by these standards? Though the Tour has been the French national sport par excellence, it is now dominated by foreign riders ‹ most notably the American Lance Armstrong ‹ so that its purview is no longer that within the national boundaries of France ‹ once again a sign of globalization. Baseball and American football have been the national sports in the USA but soccer is making inroads because of the American team competing in the world cup finals and the large Mexican immigrant population that has organized and supported soccer teams at a local levels . It may be pertinent to go beyond mere value judgements and analyze those national sports, which have not yet been contaminated, if indeed there are any. Even a minor sport on the world stage, cricket, once a British sport, a heritage of the colonized from the colonials, particularly those of Indian subcontinent where the subjugated of the past outplay their former masters, has also had its share of scandal. All these permutations may presage changes in world societies and  cultures, as Huizinga pointed our in his brilliant, albeit flawed study about the  significance of games for civilizations".

RH:The Tour de France is mostly a test of legs and endurance. The racers are human mules, and like mules they are interested only in the road they are following. I bicycled with my eyes wide open all over France, and in addition through Belgium, Holland, Germany, Austria,  Italy, Spain and Portugal. I have on a wall the large map of France which served me so well. I also had the relevant Baedekers to enlighten me, I have in my hand now the one on Spain and Portugal.  I used not only my legs, but my eyes and my head. My main interest was Gothic architecture, and I have from those times a large collection of postcards.  Go you understand now why I think the Tour de France mules were wasting their time?

My attitude toward the Olympics is similar to that toward the Tour de France.  In both cases, the abuse of drugs has been a major concern. The Economist ( (8/7-13/04) "celebrated" the Olympics with a long article on the subject; the theme of the cover was "Drugs and the Olympics". I watched a ping pong match in which little Chinese jumped like madmen around a table trying to hit a small plastic ball.  I watched a wrestling match in which two fat men slammed each other on the floor while the crowd roared. Devoid of such brutality was the swimming contest I watched, an event which would make fish laugh. I am afraid I do not have the competitive spirit  The aim of a sports contest is not simply to do well oneself, which is commendable. It is to defeat someone else, and gloat privately while the defeated try to show that they are good sports. Sports can be judged by the amount of violence.  If you have been knocked unconscious in a boxing match, it must be difficult to congratulate the winner.

As for Johan Huizinga, the great exponent of the Middle Ages, games played a minor place in this vision of things.  He was imprisoned by the Nazis during World War II.  Hitler sponsored the 1936 Olympics at which the Germans won 33 gold medals.  They beat the other countries! What a great sporting event!

Your comments are invited. Read the home page of the World Association of International Studies (WAIS) by simply double-clicking on:   http://wais.stanford.edu/
E-mail to hilton@stanford.edu. Mail to Ronald Hilton, Hoover Institution, Stanford, CA 94305-6010. Please inform us of any change of e-mail address.