Why Don’t the Lebanese Care About the Olympics?

Imagine this hypothetical situation: The Lebanese football (soccer) team has made it to the world cup, but on the day of the grand opening where teams introduce themselves to the world, the Lebanese team is the only that doesn’t have an official attire because the government couldn’t finance their trip. Can you imagine the kind of uproar such a situation would spark? Do you think that a Lebanese government would survive the assault of angry mobs, newspaper headlines and tweets?

But that is exactly what is happening now with the team representing Lebanon at the London Olympics. According to Katy Bachrouche who is swimming on behalf of our country, “[We are] disappointed in Lebanon for not providing us with formal attire. We will be wearing our warm-ups with duct-tape to cover up the excess logos”. Raise your hand if you’re expecting a government-toppling scandal to come out of this.

Yawns all around

The Olympics are supposed to be as important as the football world cup. They’re supposed to be a moment where the world celebrates a common humanity and a spirit of exciting sportsmanship. But the Lebanese can’t get themselves to care. I’m guilty as charged: The news about the olympics to me are simply the noise that is surrounding the news I’m really after when I visit twitter or watch TV.

To understand how little we care about the olympics, it’s instructive to look at how much we care about football. A few weeks ago, I was watching the evening news in a particularly eventful day of tire-burning and political deadlock in Lebanon. And yet the first item on the news was not about the antics of Ahmad el Assir, the missile exchanges in Tripoli or the country falling apart next door; it was about the excitement over the upcoming game between Spain and Italy at the Eurocup final (Oh man what a game that was!). A dedicated TV crew was covering the buzz from a restaurant which was filled with excited football fans who came 3 hours (3 hours!!) before the game began to find seats.

In the classifications of international sporting events, the Eurocup is less important than the Olympics. But when the Europeans play football, we sell flags on the streets and raise them on our balconies and our cars. Our restaurants create funny campaigns and themed menus. We allow our kids to skip homework to watch the games. We don’t do any of that for the Olympics.

An unsolved mystery

Why don’t we care ? I don’t know. We just don’t. Some say it’s because we never did well in the Olympics, but I don’t buy that. A Lebanese team has never made it to the football world cup, but that didn’t stop us from being crazy about the game and raising German, Brazilian and Italian flags instead of Lebanese ones.

I guess it’s just the way it is. Some countries, for various historical, colonial and cultural reasons, don’t care about certain sports. Americans don’t care about soccer, the world doesn’t care about Baseball, continental Europe doesn’t care about cricket and we don’t care about the Olympics.