Fear and Loathing at the Olympics

TO MOST OF the world, Utah is just another foreign country. You cross the sea for another wintry Olympiad, and you expect an exotic culture, strange rituals, quaint customs. For the American mainstream media, however, Utah may as well be another planet.

Throughout the 2002 Games, it never feels like the world meeting the United States on its soil as much as it feels like the rest of the United States encountering the strange, foreign culture of Mormon Utah, of working cowboys and Native Americans, of the Mountain West and the Great Basin Desert. It might just as well be the Amish Olympics. Or the Martian Games. Welcome to Planet Utah.

The Olympics have accomplished what progressive Utahns have spent generations failing at—opening up the bars, putting a lid on Mormon proselytizing, and even distributing condoms in the midst of an intricately choreographed stare down between the city and its visitors. The locals are nearly as worried about what the world will think of them as they are concerned about the swarm of immorality descending like a plague on these quiet folk. In a state accustomed to self-determining authority, citizens are holding their breath as the capitol city is leased out for this decadent corporate frat party.

THE OLYMPIC MOVEMENT

The Olympics and Salt Lake City are a perfect fit for each other, compatriots in striving for Osmond-esque wholesomeness and a clean-cut image, but not without an "oh my heck!" lurking beneath the surface, held back by tongues too-long bitten in suppression. The Olympic Movement is a philosophy of "peace through sport," but the actual Olympics are a private club for elite athletes, for wealthy patrons and corporations, and, much to the chagrin of the charter members, for the creme of the crop of schemers, scammers, and scalpers.

I come down into Utah from the high plains of Wyoming, descending through the cold and wind into the outskirts of a town called Morgan where my '76 Saab blows up 20 miles from destination Ogden. "This is the place," I tell myself, and then make a quick call to AAA to get myself the hell out of there.

Whatever this Olympic Movement is really about, I want to see it for myself. I don't trust the middlemen. There's more media than ever at these Olympics, in part due to the home court advantage for the American press, but also because of the promise of headline-grabbing security issues compelling outlets to send another representative or two to Utah, just in case the world ends. They're here to be on the scene when a terrorist act adds unexpected fireworks to the opening ceremony, when a crop duster hits the Olympic Village with anthrax, or when the snowboarding contingent is taken hostage by those same terrorists who finance their regime by selling nickel bags of pot on the streets of Seattle.

Given the overwhelming onslaught of microphone-toting inquiring reporters, I'm not sure I want to be associated with the media. The Salt Lake Olympic Committee feels the same way about me, and I settle into a nice compromise in the second-string media contingency, with no event credentials but with access to bathrooms without lines and lazy-boy recliners around a big-screen TV.

The crowds themselves are respectful, if foreign to the early-to-bed ways of Salt Lake City. There are revelers tripping past the Temple until well after midnight in a city notorious for having lights out at 7 pm. The media, however, have been astonishingly short-sighted, intrusive, and rude. You really have to wonder what reporters are thinking as they interrupt a Navajo flute player in the middle of a performance, walking on to his stage and talking to him for over 5 minutes before letting him get back to the crowd he was performing for. While any of us might have been happy to yell out "down in front" at lesser offenses, none of us could overcome stupification enough to say, "hello, there's a concert going on!"

With the media outnumbering athletes two-to-one, and with Salt Lake City desperate to show a better face then its nation knew it had, the media have been unnecessarily elevated to untouchable status. In a city walking on needles and pins, the press is full of its own hot air, floating above the fray and letting neither security, decency, respect nor decorum stand in the path of the story its pursuing.

THE OLYMPICS ON $10 A DAY

The skyrocketing price tag on tickets, hotel rooms, and rental cars ensures that the rest of us will keep our distance, settling for peddler to the proletariat Bob Costas and his NBC-sanctioned opiate for the masses.

For the athletes, there is still purity at the core of the Games, but the rest of us need to tear through layers of corporate filtering before we can get at the unadulterated experience. Despite all attempts at using astronomical pricing to create a self-selecting elite population at Club Olympic, there is no shortage of obscure-sport enthusiasts willing to dip into the nest egg to crack open a once-in-a-lifetime vacation. But there are those who will go even farther, curl-heads and shred-heads, speed freaks and the teddy-bear faithful of the figure skating world coming to Salt Lake for a budget Olympics, going underground to steal a deal, and even finding ways to skirt the $300 million security system. For those with what Waddie Mitchell, cowboy-poet-laureate of the Salt Lake Olympics, calls "that no-quit attitude," there is a way to see a dream fulfilled.