Olympic Fraud.

• Author: Zirin, Dave
• Position: Edge of Sports - 2010 Winter Olympics - Essay

It was called the "Own the Podium" campaign, Canada's efforts to win enough gold medals to make Ron Paul defect. Its zeal for gold meant such sporting practices as locking athletes from other countries out of the practice facilities. Anything for an edge. This lockout included the luge sliders at the whip-fast run in Whistler. As a result, the Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili had only one-tenth the practice runs as his Canadian opponents when he lost control and sped to his death.

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Poor sportsmanship doesn't always kill. But it was evident at every corner of the games, and not just from our neighbors from the North. There was Russian skater Evgeni Plushenko, who, after earning the silver medal, first climbed up to the gold medal spot.

He also decided to go figure skating macho by criticizing winner Evan Lysacek: "If the Olympic champion doesn't know how to jump quad.... I don't know. Now it's not men's skating. Now it's dancing."

Then there was the Russian ice pair, Maxim Shabalin and Oksana Domnina, who performed a dance they called a "tribute" to Australian Aboriginal culture. It was a tribute only if you consider Amos 'n' Andy to be a tribute, as well.

Or take South Korean gold medalist Lee Jung-Su, who slammed the U.S. speed skater Apolo Ohno as "too aggressive" in a post-race news conference. Even though Lee won the gold and Ohno the silver, Lee said, "Ohno didn't deserve to stand on the same medal platform as me. I was so enraged that it was hard for me to contain myself during the victory ceremony." In South Korea, you can buy toilet paper with Ohno's face on it.

This range of ugliness--from the catty to the racist to the fatal--was significant because it exposed the reality of what the Winter Olympics were all about. The International Olympic Committee--that sewing circle of monarchists, extortionists, and absolved fascists--likes to hide behind the pretense of nobility. It claims to care not for profit or personal gain, just the glory of "Olympism" as represented in its Magna Carta: "the Olympic...