"My Dad Ran the Olympics, and all I Got Was This Slave-Made Prole Cap"
Bodies in the subway, here-we-go-again cotton... Why do you people keep buying new clothes?
I hate the Olympics.
Even as a small uncoordinated child who had delusions of growing up to be a gymnast, there are few public events I’ve found more depressing than the hoopla that honks all around the Olympic Games.
It sounds so great, in theory—the whole world coming together to celebrate the spirit of, uh… of Greek city-states finally coming together to repulse an invasion by the mighty Persian empire, then succeeding against all odds in getting them to go away (supposedly in defeat, but mostly in annoyance), which was followed by a deadly strain of megalomania, which resulted in these glorious Greek city-states trying to grab a local empire (why beat off the Persians and then emulate them? seems like everybody does this, so there must be some reason) by picking each other’s militaries and morale to death until they were so weakened that some goddamn Macedonian and his son were able to sweep in from the north and basically end their importance in the world forever, but not without an imperial spasm of their own.
(breathes)
For the TL;DR stalls, it’s like, “peace and jingoism FTW.”
Truly inspiring.
I thought I had cleverly avoided the Olympics. I lived in Chicago when that city made its big Olympic bid, and lost to Rio de Janeiro, and there was much whining and “they cheated” amongst politicians, but the actual Chicago inmates I know?—we all breathed a sigh of relief.
Guess what I forgot to check for when I made the big romantic decision to move to Paris, France?
Yeah, I forgot to make sure THEIR mayor, Anne Hidalgo, wasn’t completely insane and corrupt.
But clearly she is, because she pushed so hard actually won the bid to host the biggest murderer-magnet since Devil in the White City. An Olympic Games in the age of hyper-terrorism? What a great plan to attract tourists, lady—or burn the whole city down.
So they’ve already ruined my summer.
Time to complain! Google google google…
Ten seconds later…
Why does this discussion of formal vs informal (sheesh, it’s like they can’t spend enough money) uniforms for the Olympic Committee sound eerily familiar?
What a coincidence, I’ve already found a company that was mentioned for its non-stellar labor practices the last time we had the stupid Olympics.
Sure, I found it while overtly looking for something to bitch about—as I said, not only do I hate Events, they’ve made it personal this time. So of course I’m looking for something to bitch about that’s bigger than my personal inconvenience.
It didn’t take long for me to find things to complain about, but I really didn’t expect their UNIFORMS to give me this big of a chance… it’s HYX that sounds familiar, innit? Wasn't there already a bit of a kerfuffle when this same company supplied the Tokyo games?
Possible forced labor and whatnot?
The answer then seemed to be "ah naaaah, look over there," as I recall?
That's not very Olympic Spirit-y of them.
Here we go, here’s Axios, sketching the sketchy-ass debate from the last go-around in 2020 (my goodness, plagues and disasters will make four years fly right by!), in pretty clear terms, all things considered:
Yeah, that’s about all we had to say about slavery in the Olympics the last time the subject came around.
And for the Paris Olympics, whilst HYX has quietly been slipped onto the gravy train again, very few are even complaining.
Look.
I'm sorry if you like sports, sports are great, I like sports too, and dinosaurs.
But the way the Olympic committee is treating the host city is annoying enough that I'm going to continue to nitpick every single thing it does, from Uyghur forced-labor cotton allegations to making me get a QR code to leave my §è&é house, and I will continue to do so right up till the second the goddamn circus leaves town and probably after, so don't say I didn't warn you.
To be fair, after reading the limited material available on the subject, though, even as an Olympics-hater, I have to admit: There are a lot of professional activists involved in what little protest there has been.
Professional activists should be taken with a grain of salt, and come to think of it, I've heard there is now a substantial amount of forced labor in the clothing industry in the UK (quoting a friend with his own sources, no I don't have receipts, bear with me, thinking out loud), so where else are they supposed to get uniforms from?
… the obvious answer being, THE SUPPLY CLOSET.
We're supposed to be worried about the environment, right?
I'm agnostic about global warming, both because I'm not a scientist—why is every Classics major and business student asked to have a solemn opinion about everything they didn’t study in school?—and because my central nervous system always shits the bed when it’s cold out, so theoretically I’m in favour of global warming, unless it kills us.
But still, environmental concerns seems like one of those “better safe than sorry” things. Yeah, human ingenuity, blah blah—but I like breathing. I would like the air to be clean, please; I think your @ss can handle walking a mile to the grocery store, so get out of the SUV. If you believe in a god, he gave you feet for a reason. Evolution might have had a more cut-and-dried motive.
And we are currently stuffing our landfills with more clothing than any of us could wear in five lifetimes, because “yeah but that b@tch is going to KNOW this shirt is from last season.”
Granted, fashion is one of the great pleasures of life, for many. But are sports about fashion? I’m pretty sure you could run track and field in a uniform from 1960 and not only would it not affect your performance (performance sportswear is one of the great rube traps of all time, especially for amateurs), but you would look less stupid.
Every four years, do the Olympic Games need to print thousands of additional garments for sports people who already have thousands of fun-run T-shirts?
I'm sure they have stocks of uniforms going back to the original Spartans (except didn’t those guys fight shirtless? You know what I mean).
I may not be an ostentatious environmentalist, but I buy 99.9 percent used clothing, mostly because I'm not going to pay 700 dollars for a pair of shoes, but also I'm not going to pay 40 dollars for a sh@t pair of Target shoes when some desperate housewife with a Xanax problem is selling her 700-dollar pumps that she used once for 37 on Vinted.
And I don’t know if this is just a “cope” (thanks for nouning that verb in service of removing yet another layer of subtlety from all discussions), but I genuinely find it more fun to hunt for thrift stuff than to purchase and replicate that “look” I saw in even Zadig and Voltaire’s window.
Do I sound like someone whose grandparents were still haunted by the Great Depression to you?
Good. If the economy is really as bad as the kids seem to think it is, then they’re going to have to learn that not only is GrubHub not a human right, but not having to save rubber bands in a special place in the junk drawer because “you never know,” or keep a blackened can of bacon grease at the side of the stove, is ALSO not a human right.
If things are really that bad, send the money for the new uniforms to the starving kids in Grand Rapids, get a needle and thread, and embroider a new date on the uniforms from Tokyo. Put an Eiffel Tower on there too, what the heck, it will give somebody a job for a few days.
Just, you know, like, don’t take their passport and chain them in a sweatshop. Maybe the Olympic Committee themselves can be in charge of embroidering. Give them something useful to do.
Meanwhile, I will continue to ignore anyone who lectures me about global warming while they are wearing new clothes and driving a mile to the grocery store. Thank you for listening.
Except… screeeeeeeech… dig a little deeper (not that the New York Times is terribly deep, come on), and it’s not just the clothes.
It gets worse. And worse and worse. Have you peeked at the French government’s/Olympics Committee’s death totals for this whole circus? Yeah, there are death totals for Olympic construction. Not only that, but they are FUDGED.
According to the NYT, two people died building a new subway project specifically to service the Olympics, and they weren’t even counted in the official total because, well, I guess Paris was planning to pick up that new subway line on the way home, so file under GROCERIES.
Oh, dear—dangerous conditions for migrant workers on Olympics construction sites? What a shock. It’s almost like they’re pals with the FIFA World Cup gang, I mean cartel, I mean committee.
I promise, I love sports.
But the dodgy labor situations aren’t only coming from some random affiliate that maybe made possibly-iffy cotton in a satellite province of China, but maybe we can’t quite follow the supply chain...
No, some of these calls are coming from inside the Olympic Village, potentially coming straight from the Olympic Committee or their subcontractors, and possibly the city itself.
Not to mention how convenient is that it’s so easy for contractors to glom on to six or seven decades of France having a disastrous, ill-thought-out, simultaneously self-destructive and patronising immigration non-system that works only harm on the natives and the newcomers alike—as an immigrant myself, cliched as it is, the only word that comes to mind is a surname, Kafka—but one that, somehow, always works wonders for the least scrupulous of those who were born both to the French Republic and stacks and stacks of Daddy’s cash.
I mean, this isn’t exactly slavery, but the minimum wage here is just over 11 euros. You want to pay people 11 euros an hour to do construction? Remind me to never go NEAR any of these “structures.” Instead of tofu buildings, we’re making subway tunnels out of rotten Brie.
I would be very surprised if the difference between what the Olympic committee had budgeted to pay the workers and what they actually got paid did NOT end up in someone’s pocket, now that I think about it.
Maybe I lived in Chicago for too long—clearly l’esprit des ventoux is going to follow me wherever I go for life—and I’m sorry for having a class-warrior moment, but does any of this sound like a coincidence? What are these people thinking? Are they just unconsciously moving the pieces around, then pleasantly surprising themselves when they found they’ve discovered a new way to make money treating people like shit?
“Hey, we invited all these illegal immigrants here willy-nilly and with no plan… we were going to tax the peasants to feed and house them, but why not make them work in dangerous conditions so we can display our underaged gymnasts in a brand-spankin’ new facility and still make more of a profit than agreed? Once we’re done with it, the place will collapse itself. Once again, I am a financial genius!”
Huh. Nah… I sound so dumb. I think ye all’s conspiracy theories sound way more reasonable.
I still don’t think we can solve our human trafficking problem with used clothes, guys.
Néanmoins, if your personal finances aren’t where you would like them to be, start thinking in preparation for whatever crash might be coming. I hear everyone talking about the financial apocalypse, the civil war, the third world war (if it happens, I hereby blame the Internet), all the time. You don’t want to be so far in debt over shoes that you’re vulnerable to things like being human trafficked, do you?
Yeah, that’s pretty extreme. But it happens to people, all over the world, yup, even today. Even if you don’t feel that bad for them, there’s a non-zero chance it can happen to anyone. All jokes aside, we don’t know what is coming, so maybe evaluate your wants versus your needs.
And also, if there a clever, invisible, if not so socially acceptable, way to get what you want, why not use it? I mean, people use hidden labor abuses to get what they want all the time and get away with it. Why not just… try thrifting?
Nobody can read your mind and see that you bought the cheapest Fendi pants you saw on Poshmark. No more than they can see the workers in your basement sweatshop! Or the bodies buried in the foundation of that building. If you can only afford a new Chanel piece every five years, then your “new” stuff is generally at least as dated as my used stuff. You might not like my style, but I sure do, and 99 percent of my wardrobe is used designer.
You think a depression is coming? I’m not an economist, and those who are never seem to stop accusing each other of cherry-picking, but once again, sometimes you’re better safe than sorry. Use your Depression logic!—Why would you ever spend 700 euros on a pair of shoes? I mean, unless you can walk on the moon with them. But that doesn’t mean cheap clothes are better—hell, considering the amount of slave labor that goes into your average piece of new clothing, the cheap clothes are possibly MORE overpriced.
Buying new clothes isn’t just human trafficking, it’s irrational. So what if I have to put my slightly used shoes in the freezer for a little bit? Pick old uniforms out of the back room so we don’t have to decide between forced labor and running around the arena buck naked?
Grant me the serenity to change the things I can, I guess.
We hosted them here in Sydney in 2000. I guess it was beneficial for a short period of time, which means nothing now because Australia's economy just keeps getting worse all these years later.