On Saturday, August 16, 2008, Usain Bolt ran the 100m final at the Beijing Olympics in a mind-boggling 9.69 seconds, a new Olympic and World Record. The then 21-year-old Jamaican stopped accelerating with about 30m left to engage the thousands of fans in the stadium and the billions watching on TV and over the Internet with an exultant display of chest-pounding bravado. The race ends in less than ten seconds. The intrigue begins. Did he or didn’t he? Is he clean or is he, like the majority of the “champions” before him, pharmaceutically enhanced?
In Seoul, South Korea, 1988, Ben Johnson blew away the field in a similar fashion, clocking in at a brisk 9.79. The world sat amazed. They would heap praise and exultation on the new Olympic champion. Ben Johnson was on the verge of becoming a global celebrity and sporting icon. However, only days later, after Johnson tested positive for anabolic steroids, reality set in; cynicism and sport were to be forever entwined. After Johnson, anyone and everyone who performed like an exceptional sprinter would be assumed guilty until proven otherwise.
Usain Bolt and Ben Johnson both are Jamaican born sprinters. Both set extraordinary marks in arguably the biggest event at any Olympic Games. While Usain Bolt’s effortless performance that draws snickers and accusatory whispers mere seconds after he crossed the finish line, Johnson’s revelation in 1988 came as a shock to the world. It was shocking that a top Olympian - who ostensibly embodied many of the ennobling virtues of sport - could ever do such a thing as utilize steroids to gain an unfair advantage over the field. Johnson became a running punch-line after Seoul. He did indeed become the standard those who followed would be measured against - but for all the wrong reasons.
The events in Seoul once and for all ushered the sporting world into an era of limitless and pitiless cynicism, where sport was no longer about the camaraderie of play or the inspiration of being witness to great feats. Rather, sport was an object of suspicion, a site for the cynical to render extemporaneous judgment on those who strove to transgress existing physical limitations. After Seoul, spectators embraced schadenfreude and attempted to tear down supposedly extraordinary athletes to the level of criminals and charlatans. In short, the ubiquitous suspicion - nigh, assumption - of misdeed is one sporting “fans” share with the twisted logic of totalitarian Nazi Germany: all are suspect of ambiguously defined “sins” and all may be destroyed.
What I propose in this paper is to examine this situation through three accounts of three ideas in relation to modernity: cynicism, judgment, and disenchantment. Gilles Deleuze’s brief essay “To Have Done With Judgment”, Jane Bennett’s book The Enchantment of Modern Life, and William Chaloupka’s Everybody Knows will be texts to supplement my ideas. In what way is spectator / fanatic suspicions about athletic accomplishments a symptom of larger social, cultural, and political problems in modern life? I attempt to posit an answer through an examination of one term and its lack: trust-mistrust. The proliferation of this complacent attitude of resentment, unfounded skepticism, and insatiable suspicion has conditioned “moderns” into creatures of ressentiment. The joy of a player sublimely interacting with spectator has been displaced. The player comes to resent the prejudicial and commodifying eye of the crowd. The crowd resents the player for having aspirations of transcending the terrestrial bounds chaining down ordinary men. The consuming eye partakes in schadenfreude, accusation, and denigration.
The judging eye is, first, a policing gaze: enforcing obsolescent morals. Deleuze illustrates this point well. Second, the judging eye sees its task as being serious, in spite of the medium it expresses itself. Deleuze provides a difference between combat and war that provides a starting point to this discussion. And lastly, the judging eye is the eye of the consumer. Man no longer encounters man. Man buys and sells man.
