Summer Games begin

Friday, Aug. 8, 2008 | 2:07 a.m.

Another chapter of the storied Olympic movement will be ushered in by today’s opening ceremonies for the Beijing Games. For sports enthusiasts the two weeks of the Summer Olympics will provide a smorgasbord of athletic contests the likes of which are rivaled by only one other sporting event, the Winter Olympics.

But the idea that the Olympics are merely about sports faded decades ago. Flash back and we see black American sprinter Jesse Owens shattering the Aryan myth by winning four gold medals before Adolf Hitler’s eyes at the 1936 Berlin Games. The 1956 Melbourne Games turned bloody when the Soviet and Hungarian water polo teams clashed violently. That year the Soviet army had crushed an anti-communist revolution in Hungary.

There was the black power salute by American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Mexico City Games, the American boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the reciprocal Soviet-led Eastern Bloc withdrawal from the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles. The low point, though, occurred at the 1972 Munich Games when 11 Israeli athletes and coaches and a German police officer were slaughtered by pro-Palestinian terrorists.

American athletes who followed Owens have also delivered their share of Summer Olympic feats, such as swimmer Mark Spitz’s seven gold medals in 1972, Bob Beamon’s electrifying long jump in 1968, and Kerri Strug’s heroic vault on one good leg to seal gold for the women’s gymnastics team at the 1996 Atlanta Games.

Now that the Olympics reside in the first communist nation to host the Summer Olympics since the Soviet Union in 1980, we can expect more of the same — superlative athletic performances and pageantry mixed with a highly charged political atmosphere punctuated by China’s poor record on human rights and its crackdown in Tibet.

If we can get a clear glimpse of the Olympics through Beijing’s stifling pollution, we will see they are really a reflection of the world we live in, occasionally unsettling, but often inspiring and sometimes even eye-opening.