Olympics And Amateur Sports

The Olympics and Amateur Sports

Track and field is still popular in the Sixth World, but mostly on the college level. Chipped competition never got a foot in the door. Frag, they were still testing for steroids until 2014, when the new generation of training drugs came along and made testing too difficult to be practical.

Any and all pharmaceutical boosts have been legit since then, but the bosses in amateur athletics made cyber the kiss of death. This ban includes collegiate baseball, football, and basketball, but it really makes sense in track and field. Watching a bunch of people "compete" to see whose implants can toss his bod the farthest is mega-boring. But the issue got carried too far. The "purity of essence" thing is almost a religion, and the amateur sports authorities are the high priests. Even a datajack is enough to get someone disqualified, and that is fragging stupid.

Magic is O-U-T. Big meets lay on a couple of wage mages to scope competitors. Any athlete who wants to register with an organized athletics association or try out for an Olympic team gets scanned astrally to make sure he's not a physad.

UCAS athletics were opened to metahumans in 2041. Outside the Japanese-controlled areas in San Francisco, the CFS opened up at about the same time. The CAS still has a bad attitude about metas, but most of its teams, like most of its
colleges, are nominally open to metahumans by now. Athletics in corporate enclaves follow company policy, natch, but there's usually a token meta or two in even the most racist organizations, especially in sports where the metas have a big advantage. Weightlifting is about 30 percent troll, for instance, as is wrestling, and Windheels Lincoln, an elf, took the gold in the 100-meter dash in the last UCAS games. His 9.1 -second time is the world record, and people figure him fora big winner in the Tokyo Olympics in 2056. If the International Olympic Committee can get Japan to back off from its no-go position about metas in the competition, that is.

Olympics

The Olympics sort of fell apart from 2032 to 2040, what with little distractions like the Crash of '29, the collapse of the U.S., and the EuroWar. The Games were revived officially in 2044, even though several different sets of Olympics were held during the disorganized period. Heck, in 2034 there were three Games, in Beijing, Buenos Aires, and Johannesburg. None of these competitions had more than twenty countries participating, and all results from these "outlaw" games were dropped from official records when the new International Olympic Committee (IOC) started the Games up again.

The Olympics are the ultimate defenders of "purity" in "amateur" athletics. Paid professionals, cybered athletes, and
physical adepts are their big concern. Other probs get the big blind eye.

The Olympics were opened to multinational corporate teams in 2044, and now winning a medal is worth big corp prestige. About a fifth of all medals end up going to corporate "amateur" athletes. Nice to know that someone who puts in an hour a week sitting at a desk, pulls down a comfy salary for doing it, and spends the rest of the time getting the best training money can buy, is an amateur.

The Olympics still run Summer and Winter Games, and only a few of the events have changed in the last fifty years. The
Winter Games haven't changed at all, in fact.

Rhythm gymnastics, synchronized swimming, and yachting were cut from the Summer Games and replaced by kendo (added for the 2056 Tokyo Games, so this is still up in the air), karate/tae kwon do, jai alai, and lacrosse.

The Tokyo Hassle

Japan, after it won the bid for the '56 Games, announced that in keeping with the Yamato ideal, metas would not be permitted to compete with normals in Tokyo, but would be scheduled in special "exhibition" contests. The two elven nations, Tir Taimgire and the Shidhe Dominion in Ireland, are in a meltdown, and have damn near buried the U.N. in resolutions. Pro-meta policlubs and organizations are pressuring their governments to boycott the Games if Japan doesn't back down. The IOC has sternly waved its hands at Japan, and even threatened to form a subcommittee to study the matter intensely. The Japanese are obviously shaking in their tabi. Japanese corps are slotting Ghost-only-knows how many nuyen into IOC funding and the Olympic bigwigs are scared drekless of losing the money pipeline. It's anyone's guess how things are gonna turn out

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