TIMES OF LONDON TAKE ON TERRORISM
Athens 2004
May 04, 2004
US journalists sign up for terrorism survival course
by Simon Barnes, Chief sports writer
NEVER mind optimum split times for the individual medley or the importance of upper-body strength in Greco-Roman wrestling — and never mind the designer steroids and superstar tantrums either. A bunch of American sports hacks are preparing for the Olympic Games with a terrorism survival course.
Forty journalists from The New York Times, New York Daily News, Newsday and Newsweek are doing the same course as their colleagues who went to Iraq.
They will learn from the Hampshire-based firm Centurion Risk Assessment about car bombs, blast injuries, biological attacks and mass panic.
The first response to this is mild derision. Americans divide the world into America (safe) and abroad (unspeakably dangerous because it is full of foreigners). Most Americans would like a course in chemical warfare before a week in the Cotswolds.
But the second thought is a bit more grown-up. I will, after all, be walking those same Athens streets, watching those enormous events in those same enormous arenas. I, too, will be a part of the world’s biggest soft target.
That is a cause for legitimate concern. I recall the fraught atmosphere in 1988 at the Seoul Olympics, which were threatened with disruption from North Korea.
That never happened, but in 1996 I heard the bomb blast that killed two people at the Atlanta Olympics: so much for the safety and security of America.
It is an inescapable fact that both sport and terrorism have reached a much bigger audience since then.
Revelations in this newspaper make it clear that the tight schedule of the building programme in Athens will seriously curtail time for on-site security preparations.
At the Munich Games in 1972 the Black September movement killed 11 members of the Israeli team. The outrage was effective in that it killed people and attracted worldwide attention.
Whether it was effective in achieving the Palestinian guerrilla organisation’s aims is a different matter. There is an argument for saying that it disastrously hardened world opinion against the movement.
But does terrorism have an agenda beyond terror? That is the question that concerns me. The Olympic Games pretend to be above politics, but they are a feast of undiluted nationalism. The Games are the most politicised sporting event of the quadrennial sporting round, and they have been dominated — in terms of sponsorship, commercial opportunity, television, medals and moral control — by the United States.
The dominant image is of pouting athletes wrapped up in the Stars and Stripes; the dominant mood is American triumphalism. Every four years the Olympic Games celebrate American global dominance. Terrorism may not happen, but the possibilities of terrorism have certainly crossed the minds of those best able to create it.
Yet I am looking forward to these Games as nothing else this year.
The event I am dreading is football’s European Championship finals in Portugal. England will be there, you see.
At the Olympic Games terrorism is a middle-distance possibility. At the European Championship drunken violence, hideous nationalism, bad vibes and a constant atmosphere of threat are a stone-cold certainty.
Best get things in perspective.