You mean the Olympic Games 2024 at Paris, correct? Well, yes and no. Yes, because they are historically called the Olympic Games, and no because of the amount of chemicals consumed by the participants in order to win those medals.

This Olympic Games movement started because of the enthusiasm shown by one Frenchman at the turn of the last century. Baron de Coubertin was a French educator and historian, co-founder of the International Olympic Committee, and its second president. He is known as the father of the modern Olympic Games.

He strove hard to make all nations come together in sporting harmony, and his motto was: “The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle, the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.”

Modern Olympic games also follow the Latin motto

Citius Altius Fortius – or, Faster Higher and Stronger

What began as a movement for showcasing the best physical prowess of humanity slowly glided down to one of the basest of human tendencies – the tendency to cheat. In Sanskrit it’s called vipralipsa. The situation today is so dire that the old motto may very well mean –

Citius – Faster acting drugs

Higher – Higher performance guarantee through chemicals

Stronger – Stronger resilience towards anti-doping probes

According to British journalist Andrew Jennings, a KGB (the then Soviet Secret Service) colonel stated that the agency’s officers had posed as anti-doping authorities from the International Olympic Committee to undermine doping tests and that Soviet athletes were “rescued with [these] tremendous efforts”. On the topic of the 1980 Summer Olympics, a 1989 Australian study said, “There is hardly a medal winner at the Moscow Games, certainly not a gold medal winner, who is not on one sort of drug or another: usually several kinds.

The Moscow Games might as well have been called the Chemists’ Games.

Why do nations cheat? Well, there are many reasons, but here are few of the most prominent:

• There’s money to be made
• Sports achievements bring glory to the nation
• There’s a national “feel better” effect

In the bitter feud between capitalist and communist countries (especially in the Cold War era) more medals were touted as evidence that their system of governance works, and their population is healthier.

As we are on the topic of “cheating,” isn’t it proper that we dive deeper into the phenomenon of cheating? According to Vedic wisdom it belongs to the same shelf as three other defects: imperfect senses, tendency to be illusioned, and committing mistakes. This “gang of four” is collectively responsible for the entire “career” of a conditioned soul in this material world.

Bhrama refers to false knowledge or mistakes, such as accepting a rope as a snake or an oyster shell as gold. Pramada refers to inattention or misunderstanding of reality, and vipralipsa is the cheating propensity. Karanapatava refers to imperfectness of the material senses.

A mistake (pramada) is the acceptance of an object to be different from what it is or the acceptance of false knowledge. For example, one may see a rope in the dark and think it to be a serpent, or one may see a glittering oyster shell and think it to be gold. These are mistakes. Similarly, an illusion (bhrama) is a misunderstanding that arises from inattention while hearing, and cheating is the transmission of such defective knowledge to others. Materialistic scientists and philosophers generally use such words as “may be” and “perhaps” because they do not have actual knowledge of complete facts. Therefore, their instructing others is an example of cheating (vipralipsa). The final defect of the materialistic person is his imperfect senses (karanapatava). Although our eyes, for example, have the power to see, they cannot see that which is situated at a distance, nor can they see the eyelid, which is the object nearest to the eye. To our untrained eyes the sun appears to be just like a plate, and to the eyes of one who is suffering from jaundice everything appears to be yellow. Therefore, we cannot rely on the knowledge acquired through such imperfect eyes. The ears are equally imperfect. We cannot hear a sound vibrated a long distance away unless we put a telephone to our ear. Similarly, if we analyse all our senses in this way, we will find them all to be imperfect. Therefore, it is useless to acquire knowledge through the senses. The Vedic process is to hear from authority. In the Bhagavad-gita (4.2) the Lord says, evam parampara-praptam imam rajarshayo viduh: “The supreme science was thus received through the chain of disciplic succession, and the saintly kings understood it in that way.” We have to hear not from a telephone but from an authorized person, for it is he who has real knowledge.

To conclude, it is a shame that an effort meant for bringing all the people of the world together in harmony has degraded to a level so as to bring out the very worst in the dark side of human nature.

—Syamananda Dasa