Peanut allergies, ADD/HD, autism … and Olympic poverty

Things over-diagosed/emphasized.

“The Olympic spirit died sometime back in the 1930s when Hitler politicized what the founder of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, envisaged as an apolitical celebration of health and athleticism. Stalin continued Hitler's work. With the dictators' politicization came another body blow to old Pierre's Olympic Ideal, the end of amateurism. All athletes from totalitarian countries and from nationalistic countries were essentially professional athletes. Now there is no distinction between an amateur and a professional, and the crass commercialization that has come to dominate the Olympics is appalling. Moreover, in America, the sentimentalization of Olympians is positively sickening. Is there not one athlete who made it to the Olympics from the land of milk and honey, with a silver spoon in his mouth, with parents who adored him, and one voluptuous break after another? Did every member of the United States team have to overcome hardship, rejection, episodes of poverty, and diseases almost too horrible to mention — but not quite? We the public are regaled with stories of what one prima donna athlete after another suffered or thought they suffered.”

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/tyrrell0628112.php3


The runner/swimmer/shot putter – whatever – made up hisher mind in hisher poverty-singlemom-drug household that one day heshe would be an Olympic runner/swimmer/shotputter, and, by golly, he/she was good enough.

Wait, wait, wait! What about competition BAD, sharing GOOD? What about “We don’t keep score”?

And then, in keeping with world peace and stuff, there is the Olympic torch relay, whose “roots lie in Nazi Germany. Carl Diem, the secretary-general of the 1936 Berlin Games, pitched the event as a way to infuse the Games with pageantry and buff the mythic image of the Third Reich. That year, on its way from
 Greece to Germany, the flame passed through Yugoslavia, Hungary,
 Austria and Czechoslovakia — all of which would be annexed or occupied within a few years."

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1932160,00.html#ixzz1z7aI6tqy