Winning for the Fatherland

June 28, 2012 by admin

Oh participate, but to win, you want to put? It gives a different satisfaction! And 'this, bare-bones, creeping ideology which oversees major international sporting events, which only apparently - or only partly - celebrate the ideals dear to the Baron De Coubertain, while in reality - or did - a battlefield, albeit simulated, where geopolitics is the host, albeit with unusual appearance. You can see it in these days the European Football Championship, with the stages that make a sounding board to cracks and tremors shaking the Old Continent, struggling with the worst crisis since the two World Wars. And more than that it shows the history of the Olympics, which have long been a veritable an affair of state, able to increase or decrease the prestige of the various nations on the chessboard of international relations.

She had understood perfectly the 'Soviet Union, which fought for forty years to the Olympic Games the Cold War that opposed the United States and more generally to the Western world. They were years of memorable challenges, especially in team sports - one of all: the basketball final in Monaco in 1972, with the winning basket marked by Belov last second - with these two opposing worlds and ready to go to war with atomic exploited the Olympic showcase to prove their supremacy. Almost always won the 'USSR, whose machine guerrra sports did rack up medals, until its implosion in 1991. And to be honest the Olympics were one of the few sectors in which socialism over capitalism prevailed, no tricks, or nearly so (I mean the doping and not only that, but that's another story).

Now that the 'Soviet Union is no more, the geopolitical challenges Olympic lives of other, perhaps less epic but equally interesting. First of all, that between the United States and China, the proven sports superpower, launched to conquer the world. But as the world is increasingly multipolar, as a result of globalization, even the sporting values leveled off and there is therefore a bevy of nations sporting heels top of the class and you give battle immediately behind the front rows. Just take a look, for confirmation, forecasts down right on the medal of the upcoming Olympics in London, which will open in less than a month. And compare with the medals left on at the Seoul Olympics, in 1988, the last attended by the 'USSR and the communist countries. Just over twenty years and it has changed everything, Olympus sports. He is not dead, however, national pride and, with it, any drift chauvinist, which today manifests itself in different ways - for example with the absurd campaign purchases of most talented athletes from the Arab States of the Gulf - but that is always very much alive, with all due respect to Baron De Coubertain. The Olympics are in fact a global event, where he raised a clenched fist on the podium at mo 'challenge - remember him? It was in Mexico City in 1968 - makes you more famous than a Nobel Prize.

The Cold War at the Olympics I realized years ago, friends of the Road Television, a nice two-part documentary entitled "The Duellists", which you can see on the website of We are the story . E 'was filmed between Russia and the United States, including interviews with several Olympic champions and unpublished reconstructions of some of the most exciting and drammaticio of that challenge.

Team				Tot
Soviet Union	55	31	46	132
German Democratic Republic	37	35	30	102
United States of America	36	31	27	94
South Korea	12	10	11	33
West Germany	11	14	15	40
Hungary	11	6	6	23
Bulgaria	10	12	13	35
Romania	7	11	6	24
France	6	4	6	16
Italy	6	4	4	14