The Olympics

I have not watched a minute of the 2008 Olympics, nor will I. Of course, this is made easier by my not owning a television set; but even if I had one, I would keep maximum distance from the whole horrible contrived pseudo-event.

Back when he published The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (a very important book!) in 1961, Daniel Boorstin opined that sports provided

...one of our few remaining contacts with uncontrived reality: with people really struggling to win, and not merely to have their victory reported in the papers. The world of ... sports is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted spontaneous event.

But Boorstin was writing before the heyday of televised sports, and the advent of ESPN and 24/7 coverage, and the major intrusion of technology into competition, and before there was even a Super Bowl (which has become one of the Big Daddy Pseudo-Events of them all). Sports nowadays is as scripted and non-spontaneous as any other entertainment form; there are only occasional surprises, wrinkles in the master narrative, because of actual competitive conditions. Lord help Michael Phelps if he (or anyone else involved) had gone "off-script" in his quest for eight gold medals.

Olympic sports as pseudo-events are particularly egregious because two months from now, no one will give a shit. At least with football, and baseball, and golf, fandom is continuous; people follow those sports. The Olympics exist in an extremely limited spatial-temporal bubble, which both athletes and advertisers realize; the endorsement window for Olympic stars is quite brief. The public, satiated, moves swiftly on to the next pseudo-event.