Okay, I admit that I’m hardly a serious sports fan. And my mastery of communications technology is basic at best. So what a surprise it was to see my name cascading through the world of cyberspace late last week in a controversy involving the Olympics, the Web and free speech.
Last Thursday, I received a call from an Associated Press reporter with some questions about Duke Magazine, the alumni magazine of Duke University, which I edit. The magazine was just beginning to run Web logs from two of Duke’s alumni participants in the Olympics: Curt Clausen, a race walker, and Jillian Schwartz, a pole vaulter. This is Clausen’s third Olympics and Schwartz’s first. The reporter wasn’t interested in their records as competitors but in their habits as bloggers. As he explained, the International Olympic Committee had barred competitors from writing firsthand accounts for websites.
According to the Associated Press, the IOC’s rationale for the restrictions was that athletes should not serve as journalists. Supposedly the IOC was concerned about the interests of accredited journalists, particularly those broadcasters who had paid out the big fees. Maybe the IOC was worried that blogs might be confused with journalism or, worse, that blogs might compete with journalism.
But the informed yet informal narrative provided by blogs are at once more personal and less sweeping than professional reporting. Their appeal is in their amateurishness.
Indeed, it seems to me that blogging is to watching or reading about the games as touring a “virtual” art gallery is to visiting a museum: They are mutually reinforcing activities. Sampling the one—the little picture—-lures you into the other—the big picture.
The notion behind our “commissioning” the blogs (the athletes aren’t being paid for blogging) was to make the Olympics movement more meaningful and more vivid to an alumni readership. So, to the anonymous but firm IOC official who told the AP that ‘third-party sites like Duke’s are covered by the restrictions,’ remember: This is an alumni magazine devoted to education, not a commercial enterprise devoted to profit-making (which, of course, would feel so out of place at the Olympics).
What you learn from a blog is what you learn from any unfiltered, on-the-scene report: You get the sights, sounds, tastes, really everything that goes into experiencing an event from a particular point of view. TV is fine for conveying images and the rough contours of story lines. But it can’t fully document individual motivations and sensations.
Blogging from his training camp in Crete, Claussen discusses dealing with the basic issues of acclimation—key factors, for him, in determining success or failure. By night, he’s easing into high altitudes, sleeping in an “Altitude Tent” at a simulated 9,000 feet. By day, he’s adapting to high temperatures. “I used the same method in 1999 in the lead-up to the World Track and Field Championships in Seville, Spain,” he writes, “where I won the bronze medal.”
What Claussen is doing is making himself a compelling character in the Olympics story. Wouldn’t people want to tune in this Friday to see that story play out as he enters competition? There’s irony in the fact that an Olympics movement associated with the birth of Athenian democracy would see fit to clamp down on the speaking rights of its participating athletes. Claussen says as much in his blog. He writes, “I think it is absolutely absurd to place a freedom-of-speech restriction on athletes and gladly violate the rule. Thanks for providing the opportunity!”
Well, Curt, you can thank a Greek guy named Pericles. As the Pelopennesian War was raging in the fifth century B.C., Pericles offered this solace in his famous funeral oration: “The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbor for doing what he likes.”
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