OzOlympics Ideas for Sydney 2000

Sydney and Melbourne need events around the Games 2000 that will delight and benefit everyone in the true Olympic Spirit, although they may not come within the present Olympic regulations. Suggestions below include ideas for an Arms Race, OzOlympics as SkillOlympics, and International Yogi events as in a 'Tibetan' competition reported on Internet.

Improvements in the Medal Tables are suggested.

Media coverage can be itself more competitive, to accord with the Olympic ideal and to please our present government policy. These media events can be held anytime, including before or after any Sports Olympics, so that tourists are encouraged to Olymptrip all over Australia. Events need not be on the official calendar.

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New Events

Suggestions have been made for new events, such as Darts, Snooker and Foot-in-Mouth. Others include:

• The Arms Race, using arms rather than legs.
• How Silly Can You Get . HOSCYG sports. To have a laugh occasionally.

Useful sports. Such as

• Headfreighting - with a jar on your head.
• Safe-driving, with obstacles such as bicycles, straw pedestrians, cars zooming in out of intersections without warning, red lights, slippery sections, speed humps, and a speed limit of 60k
• Generating electricity by bicycle or windlass.

See also SkillOlympics

A Table of Gold set next to every final Olympic Medals Table would show how much each country and sponsors spent on training hopeful elites for those Olympics - Institutes of Sport, training athletes from childhood, specialist coaches and psychologists, medications for sports injuries, etc.

These sums would not include what a country spent on sports open for the whole population to take part in for their health and enjoyment, so this table would not penalise countries with large populations. Some countries might concentrate all their Olympic funding on a few sports, but from an international point of view it is good if every country, however small, has a speciality which gives it a chance to hold up its head in this great international geffuffle.

The usual Table of Medals and the new Table of Gold would at present almost match - although not quite. The more gold a nation spends, the more Gold it gets.

National Cost per Medal. The Medal Table would also have a third column, to show how much each country effectively spent per medal on producing its elite Olympic Team.

Goldest Medals for the Honour of Nations could be awarded at the finale of the Olympic Games.

Records could be established, each calculated as per 100,000 population.

At Atlanta in 1996 for example, it was the International Year for Prevention of Poverty so the Goldest Medals could have been awarded to the countries with the:

• Fewest homeless people. Fewest substandard homes or shanties
• Lowest proportion of forests denuded
• Most desert reclaimed. Most trees planted and surviving two years
• Highest literacy - able to read a newspaper and say what features are about. Able to write a letter to a newspaper about something good or bad
• Fewest people with high incomes more than twenty times the minimum wage, or where there is no minimum wage, fewers with more than twenty times the poorest female factory worker.
• Fewest total people killed in armed riots, massacres or wars.
• Fewest murders, fewest robberies, fewest rapes, Fewest people in prison
• Least sales of arms to other countries
• Least political/economic censorship
• Best care of children/the elderly/handicapped/mentally ill
• Highest business standards of honesty, reliability, efficiency quality of products and conditions for workers. Highest worker standards of honesty, reliability, efficiency and quality of product
• Highest political standards of honesty and openness of information
• Least Gross Unnecessary Suffering (there is an index available for this for this)
• Highest Quality of Life (there is an index available for this)
• Greatest International Co-operation and Generosity (this needs to be honoured).

And so on.

The Goldest Medal total assessments could be related to GNP of each country. The greater the disparity between Goldest Medal and GNP, the greater the shame for the nation.

Media Medals are 1.Gilt 2. Tinsel. 3. Brazen.

Every country should have competitive, not monopoly reporting of events, with tat least two media rights-holders for each medium.

One media rights-holder's presentation should emphasise the original spirit of the Olympic Games:

• Delight in watching the world's top athletes performing
• Applauding the gameness of those who come last as well as first their international character,
• The pride in local athletes matched with pride in all other countries' achievements
• The chance to learn about other nations of the world.

Its straightforward, informative coverage of events would recognise

• That most viewers of Olympics are not knowledgeable about all sports.
• The commentaries would make clear what each event and sport is about, which countries compete in the final event, all who win medals, and their countries.
• Finishes would be shown with great clarity.
• Advertising, if absolutely financially necessary, would be kept to well-separated blocks with straightforward ads that would not increase a blooming buzzing confusion.

The second media rights-holder would follow present trends

• to turn the Olympics into a mishmash of pulp-sensationalism, greed, monomania, jingoism, winning as the sole aim, constant advertising intrusion, and increased expectations that athletes should be trained from childhood like Janissaries to risk lifelong injuries for 'national glory'.
• Filming is edited into hundredth-second images to prevent comprehensible sequential viewing of any event.
• It will be hard to find out about any other countries' competitors on screen or page.
• Miniflags in various tricolours hide coyly in corners and nations have unexplained labels such as ESP MAR, SUI and AUT.
• Reporters in this mode increase the high ratio of negative, vicious and aggressive emotive words to any happy and cheerful vocabulary. (There were 71% negative to 29% positive terms in one analysis of a four-page 1996 Olympic Sports supplement in a Melbourne newspaper).
• Self-loading automatic word-processing would deliver buckshot sentences that hits the paper without narrative sequencing or connections. Like Hemingway. Like Bunnyshit.

Then the breathtaking competition would be to find out which mode the Great Viewing and Reading Public turned out to prefer to view and read in each country. Could the first rights-holder gain the bigger audience? Or should there be a Senate inquiry into the Dumbing of Australia if the second media presentations won our viewers and readers?

At issue is the prospect that if every nation gives coverage almost entirely to the exploits of their own nationals - then what price our Australian glory if only Australians are going to know about it? Is Sports Glory simply to distract Australians from our failures to perform and achieve as a nation in other areas of life?

For lowest rates of:

• Preventable illnesses
• Needless deaths, including suicide, infanticide, and abortion, that need not have occurred
• Population growth (reduction is needed at present)
• Addiction to the various types of drugs
• Sums lost on gambling
• Mass stupidity - and interesting 'event' to calculate! But possible to investigate.

For highest rates/ numbers of

• Job security combined with efficient work behavious (constant anxiety is not good for people)
• Happiness of farmers - without them we all starve
• Sustainable agriculture, production and energy
• Constructive hobbies, clubs and community organisations
• Distinctive sites attractive to tourists (and to residents) - to encourage people to treasure and improve their heritage
• Distinctive cultural events

There was so much emotional language used in reporting the Atlanta Olympics, that it was amazing that journalists could keep it up so long . In a four-page newspaper feature reporting a days' Atlanta Olympics. Over 70% of the emotional language was negative. Only 29% was positive, with a ratio of 260:106. Much of the negative language was incompatible with Olympic ideals - such as:

aggressive, agony, angry, bitchiest, blaming, cried and cried, despair, devastation, disaster, feral, grief, heart of a national broke, heartbreaking, haven't done their best, inconsolable, intolerable, loathe, rabid gorilla, merciless, shoot the lights out, sobbing away, strangled, tears, tribulations, whip, grim, harshly, bit of mongrel, vicious kick, raging, strike you down, aggressive pressure, ruthless

Some reporters put far too much emphasis on ruthlessness, aggression and no mercy,

Some reporters put far too much emphasis on ruthlessness, aggression and no mercy, and even made criticisms if'harmony had replaced success as team motto ' or that 'there were no biting words' after a defeat

If reporters felt bound to be emotional, they could at least seek some sort of balance, and let their outlook on life include more of:

ecstatic, adorable, beaming, sweet, carefree, grinning, cheeky, bounced, joyful, delight, smiles, cheered, graceful, generous, shone, honest, marvellous, happy, generous, gentle, polite, perfectly, compassionately, team harmony, enthusiastic