In the good old days of the Cold War, come summer Olympic time, you could count on a killer Soviet gymnastics team fanning out across the arena, ravenous for gold, their leotards proudly blazoned with the letters “C C C P.”
As a youngster, I puzzled over those letters. “What do they stand for?” I wondered. I made up my own little phrases out of the strange acronym to pass the time during commercials. “I know!” I’d say, as the Oscar Meyer boy tunefully spelled the word b-o-l-o-g-n-a, “It stands for ‘Crummy Cheating Champion Poo-heads!’”
Yes, I was a patriot.
It was only much later, when I was studying the Russian language, that I learned that even though the Russian alphabet was created from Western bits and pieces — mostly Greek — some of the letters that looked familiar actually represented foreign sounds.
For instance, if you asked a Russian to look at one of those old Soviet leotards and read the letters out loud, you’d wouldn’t hear “C C C P;” instead, you’d hear, “S S S R.”
As in, “Soyuz (Union) of Soviet Socialist Republics.” Or, as we used to call it, back when it was a going concern, the U.S.S.R.
Mystery solved. (Although I’m still partial to “poo-head.”)
Now I’m as interested as the next person in the sight of hypermuscled mutant dwarves flinging their bodies through the air in defiance of the laws of physics and certain death, so I recently found myself parked in front of the TV during the women’s gymnastics. Setting aside the robotic, otherworldly affect of these young athletes, and the contrast between their brilliant routines and the weirdly insincere hugs and cliché-addled scrums that followed, I have to admit to an unhealthy fascination with the Russian team’s outfits.
First of all, they were pretty, which was a surprise.
But even stranger, hovering a few inches above the word “Russia –” spelled, I noted, in the Latin alphabet, not in Cyrillic — was another word: “Bosco.”
Bosco? What was that?
It occurred to me that the Russian gymnastic team, like the country itself, had fallen on hard times. Bosco must be some kind of sponsor.
But that in itself was somewhat strange. Every Olympic team has sponsors, but you don’t see the athletes walking around in NASCAR-style outfits, crazy-quilted with corporate logos.
It turns out that Bosco is the luxury apparel company that designed the pretty Russian outfits. It’s also the sole sponsor of the Russian gymnastics team, and a big player generally in the world of Russian sport. So instead of hiding their name on a tag, they get to put it out there for the world to see.
A clever move, worthy of the aggressive new style of capitalism that Russia has adopted. Even though the Russian women didn’t win the gold in gymnastics, they managed to outdo the United States in corporate marketing, a minor victory in the Cold War of our times, the international Brand Wars.
In an irony worthy of these Games, with all the fuss over the U.S. athletes’ uniforms being made in China, the Russian leotards were outsourced, too, by way of Bosco, who contracted with a company called Alpha Factor, a subsidiary of PerformGroup, LLC, which is based just down the road in York, PA.
That’s right. The Russians were wearing uniforms made in the good ole U.S. of A.
Clothing isn’t the only sphere of outsourcing in the Olympics. Let’s not forget that plenty of countries — including our own — have a sneaky habit of outsourcing the athletes themselves. For instance, four of the five athletes on the Haitian team this summer are actually not Haitian. Or rather, they are Haitian, but by a somewhat tenuous definition — foreign-born, but with a Haitian parent.
For a country like Haiti, the poorest in the Western hemisphere, with large chunks of its population parked in refugee camps, the idea of borrowing athletes from wealthier countries seems fair enough. But what about Team U.S.A.? Is anyone really bothered by the fact that it includes foreign-born athletes — and even a child of undocumented migrant workers? Should we make Danell Leyva hand over his bronze medal in gymnastics because he was born in Cuba? Of course not. This is a country of immigrants.
The modern Olympics have always embodied a tension between nationalism — U.S.A.! U.S.A.! — and a quest for excellence which transcends borders. The first modern games, which took place in 1896 in Athens, almost didn’t happen because the French were still full of resentment for the Germans over the Franco-Prussian War. In my own lifetime, in the early 80s, the United States and the Soviet Union traded boycotts of each other’s games.
But now, in a world shrunk by globalization, the playing field has gotten a lot more complicated. An athlete born in one country trains in another; lives in a third; and competes on behalf of a fourth while wearing an outfit made in a fifth.
You could tear out your hair trying to keep it all straight.
Or you could just ignore all the jingoistic ads, the terribly overwritten backstories, and the ridiculous hoopla over medal counts, and watch in awe as brave young pioneers expand the boundaries of human athletic achievement.
Poo-heads and all.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 09 August 2012
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
