#boxing;

[hiredassault]

[thethinkivist-blog]

There will be blood, but at the Olympics?

       A good week into the Olympic games, we move on today from bicycles and diving boards to a veritable feast of pugilism. Graeco-Roman wrestling comes this afternoon to North Arena 2, and the sad news here for Evening Standard’s Brian Sewell is this: the feast just isn’t bloody enough. His ghoulish piece on our ‘neutered’ version of the original sport seems to have made quite a considerable circulation online, and latches its outrage onto comparison with the Pankration – the ancient Greek precursor to what is actually, in this thoroughly modern era, termed ‘MMA’ (mixed martial arts). The same day, an article was published in Vice, entitled ‘MMA is too brutal for the Olympics, and that’s why we love it.’ Apparently, the ‘soul’ of the bloody and terrifying sport (adjectives considered selling points) would be compromised by admission into the mainstream. The Graeco-Roman or ‘Freestyle’ wrestling event, then, might be construed as the London 2012-friendly incarnation of the ancient practice. And apparently it’s not good enough. Both Sewell and Rosenblatt, journalist for Vice, extol the virile purity the of Pankration and MMA respectively, lauding the ‘kicking, strangling, butting and biting’ of the Greeks and dismissing such legitimate Olympic sports as Judo by assimilation to ‘the combat version of a tea ceremony.’ Of modern freestyle wrestling, asks Sewell – ‘Where’s the fun?’ Haunting sentiments, methinks, not just for their sadistic violence, but also, frustratingly, for their misinformation.

If MMA can justifiably be characterised by compulsory blood, and a fart in the general direction of extraneous regulation, this does not take its cue from the pankration. Rosenblatt cites the ancient event’s ‘barely there rules’ and its boycotting by the Spartans in response to the few rules that it did have. Not so. The pankration was essentially a contest of skill, and there is little ground for its stereotyping as a test of brute strength. Evidence attests to the enforcement of rules prohibiting gouging and biting, and the problem for the Spartans was rather the unrefined nature of these rules, not their mere existence. For them, the primitive sport, associated as it was with training for warfare, was not considered fit for an athletic competition. I wonder why it is for Sewell. While I pity his need for broken noses and twisted scrotums for viewing gratification, I can’t say he really got it from the Greeks. Injuries inflicted in the pankration have long been exaggerated, and, as far as is evident, fatalities were rarer than in modern boxing. So, where does the modern day bloodlust originate? Sewell seems to think his can be traced to the Iliad, and Homer’s description of the match between Odysseus and Ajax. The same Iliad, then, that describes with harrowing sensitivity the pity and waste of bloodshed. Its central hero, Achilles, engages in the necessary violence imposed on his unhappy life but, most importantly, reviles it. Even conceding the brutality of ancient Greek combat sports (which I shall), how does this justify the travesty of any sport today? Not even Olympic-style regulations and expensive headgear can hide the shocking levels of neuronal damage found even in amateur boxers. Do they have to be mangled externally too for the audience to go home satisfied? Olga Butkevych, women’s wrestler for team GB hopes to make wrestling more popular by winning herself a medal this week. ‘In England it is not a popular sport’, she says, ‘so in the future I hope it can change.’ Olga, is that really necessary?