The Torch and The Cougar

23rd April 2008

Among the continuing report flood about the danger ridden path of the Olympic torch, Tibetan independence protests, and worsening Chinese human rights records in the months leading up to the Beijing Olympics, I found an especially striking article in the Daily Yomiuri yesterday.
It detailed a murder and the circumstances surrounding it. The murder was carried out by a specialist veterinarian team in Chicago. The victim was a cougar who had apparently travelled about 1000 miles to finally find himself in the streets of the big city.
The murder was publicly approved. Animal rights groups joined the consensus as they had to admit that a predator would sooner or later get hungry, and that even after being tranquilised, the cougar could still jump up 12 ft into the air, and run 70 miles an hour.

Awe-struck, my eyes travelled across to the small portrait photograph of this beautiful murder victim. He had instantly turned into my hero of the day. An organic high performance machine. Born to run, jump, and hunt. Economically designed according to the laws of both functional and aesthetic supremacy.
And as my eyes zoomed in on his, I felt a hot desire run through my blood to slip into his perfect body. To fly in a four-legged run, bounce sky-high on big, sprung paws, set my perfectly geared muscles and lungs into motion, and run, dodge, and manoeuvre with the single minded, unbudging determination of a hungry predator; teeth ready to pierce through fur and skin, gums tingling in an irreversible ascent of desire, to be satiated only by the warm flow of blood, pulsing into its pores and crevices pumped by the victim’s heart, more fervent and alive than ever in its throes, until it stops beating and I get my fill.
I travel back to the crowded bus refreshed, with a bestial power running through my feeble human veins. Colours suddenly look brighter, outlines appear sharper, objects more focussed.
However, returning to my own body and mind, I decide that my previous train of thoughts would best be accommodated in a fictional psychotic killer of the Hannibal Lector type: an intelligent, sophisticated monster that evokes in readers a mixture of admiration and utter contempt and in this way gives them opportunity to explore the borderlines of their own sanity.

Thus having the cougar thoughts filed away, my eyes fall on the strass stone outline of a cougar jumping across my black trainers, and I recall the story of two German brothers, Adolph and Rudolph Dassler, who started a sports shoe company called ADIDAS in their mother's laundry in the 1920s. During WWII, both brothers got involved with the Nazis, Rudolph being closer to them than Adolph. Later, the two brothers fell apart, and in 1948, Rudolph founded his own sports shoe company that came to be called PUMA (German for cougar).
Yet again, I am caught between disgust, a rock and admiration, a hard place: acidic fluids are climbing up my esophagus at the thought of Rudolph’s Nazi ties, yet my head is shaking in admiration of his marketing talent for choosing the PUMA, that biological epitome of athletic prowess, as a sports wear brand. Staring at my PUMA shoes and contemplating the darkest years of my country’s past, I somehow return to the Olympic Games.
Wasn’t there another occasion when the Olympics were held in a country ruled by a most questionable regime? What did the world feel like in 1936 when the Games were hosted by the Nazis?
It makes for an interesting comparison. Hitler, advised by his dangerously talented Propaganda specialist Goebbels, made Germany look like a most admirable and respectable country. Signs that read “No Jews Allowed” were removed from all major tourist attractions, and the Fuehrer gave special orders not to subject any foreigners to the Nazis’ strict anti-homosexual laws for the duration of the games. Black athlete Jesse Owens who famously won four gold medals during the games was allowed to move freely throughout the city, using public transport and visiting places at his liking, which must have felt like royal liberties to a black man from the segregation riddled United States. While there was great controversy in the US about boycotting the Games, the supporting team finally won the struggle. Jewish athletes withdrew, making their well-founded positions on Germany’s government clear, but the United States ended up winning the second highest amount of medals in the world, following host country Germany.
It was at the Berlin Olympics, too, that the Olympic torch was first brought to its destination in a relay race, starting in Marathon, Greece. Two Korean athletes won marathon medals for Japan, under Japanese names, as their country had been annexed by Japan in 1910. And another high light brings us back to the present situation: chosen as best national anthem was the Republic of China’s “Three Principles of the People”, which features the principles diligence, courage, and trustworthiness, and the ideal of “Great Unity” interpreted along Confucian lines as “Great World Harmony” for which everybody is encouraged to strive. Nowadays, Taiwan is not allowed to play this anthem at the Olympics, forced to be part of the People’s Republic of China, just like Tibet, and just as unhappy about it.

It is difficult to decide whether we should be grateful to Communist China or angry, that it is rather shamelessly showing us its true ugly face. On the one hand, we should maybe be happy that we know what to expect rather than being misled by a calculatingly crafted propaganda machine, hiding beneath clean streets the red flow of blood through its power chords, pumped by the psychotic ruling heart of the country. On the other hand, one cannot help wondering why they didn’t at least try to hold talks with Tibet. Talks could have been extended and prolonged until long after the Olympics without taking real action, making China look good and cooperative rather than bad and stubborn.

But my aim is not to criticise or praise China for the way it is handling the situation. To me the chaotic journey of this year’s Olympic torch, the blood and the violence, the boycotts from Europe and the ensuing protests in China, contain another lesson. It was the often quoted point of view that the Olympic Games should be independent of politics that led the US team to its many victories at the 1936 Nazi Olympics. And while this is quite obviously an impossible postulation, it contains a spark of truth.

The cougar jumping across my trainers, across countless Olympic football fields and running tracks, and across the pages of my newspaper, represents the core ambition of the athlete: to maximise his physical efficiency, excel in his chosen discipline and reach his chosen goal.
The difference is that the cougar is given his disciplines and his goals by nature. He is a predator, and designed to hunt for meat. This is why even animal rights groups agreed to have the Chicago cougar shot down.
Athletes, on the other hand, are not natural predators. They choose their own disciplines, in which they compete in a collective display of human strength and potential.
Looking at our own physical composition, it seems that we are more likely to excel in intellectual than in physical pursuits. We have a choice as to what our goals are and have the potential to understand the size, nature, and quality of our resources well enough to avoid killing altogether. Yet the killing doesn’t stop. The political quibbling doesn’t stop. Can we not be wiser in our choices?

Athletes work focussing on maximum achievement, and the ensuing exploration of their own limitations serves both as a model for everyone, and a valuable counterpoint to ongoing political struggles around the world. When you have completed a marathon in 2 hours 15 minutes, or swum 1,500 metres in 14 minutes 58 seconds, exhaustion and exhilaration make all national boundaries run into a blurred periphery of insignificance.
Effort and achievement rule the individual, extended to team efforts, in which human interaction and cooperation become the number one principles to reach a common goal. Showing the world that people from its every nook and cranny are able to push themselves to breathtaking achievements, and to exchange their individual skill and beauty is an important token of world-wide human potential.

We are not compulsive predators who need to go hunting, only to be shot down by more intelligent, fearful prey. We are intelligent, thinking beings who have created a symbolic gathering of nations: in the Olympic Games, the limitations of the human body and mind are put to the test at regular intervals, the excellence of humankind is united in the workings of one world event, regardless of the national and cultural differences of its participants and spectators.

It is this constant human responsibility to improve as a whole, and the necessity to provide a peaceful working environment for this, that should be the goal WE pursue. And now that we have chosen World Peace as a sensible goal worthy of our intellectual capacities, we can cast another glance at the striking portrait of the cougar, and emulate his unbudging determination, his jumping and his running skills, and his beautiful efficiency of movement in pursuing what is the sustenance of his life.