It is a great example of how “different can be good”.

Beats a war any day.

Exactly right. Great find, Anti-Federalist.

http://lewrockwell.com/casey/casey129.html

“Okay then, let’s look at the Olympics themselves. Back in 776 BC, when they first got started in Greece, individuals competed, representing their different city-states. But in those days, every citizen knew almost everyone else; the people living in those cities – which were very small by modern standards – were related by extensive family ties, shared cultural and linguistic bonds, shared philosophical contexts, and more. So an individual from Athens could be considered reasonably representative of his fellow Athenians, as would a Spartan.

But today, Some kid-athlete from Detroit or San Diego or New York almost certainly has little in common with me – certainly less than my friends scattered around the world. He or she doesn’t represent me, or America, for that matter. Anyway, there no longer is an America, only the US. And almost none of these other nation-states today are truly “a people.” They’re cobbled together hodgepodges of various mutually antagonistic racial, ethnic, linguistic, and other classifications of people, resulting from war and conquest. Most people in most countries today don’t have anything significant in common, except the name of the government on their ID papers.”

“None of those sporting events that are supposedly between countries make any sense to me. I mean, where there used to be a Soviet Union fielding sports teams, now there’re 15 countries fielding them. There used to be a Czechoslovakia; now there’re two countries to cheer for – in the former Yugoslavia there are five. And in Germany, there used to be two of each team to cheer for, and now there’s one. It’s a completely meaningless way of grouping people, and counting the achievements of people this way means even less. It makes no sense for people to have any loyalty to these arbitrary lines drawn on maps.

I suppose some might feel some bond of kinship for the people of a region they inhabit who share a culture, language, history, and so forth. Or, for that matter, if a corporation you work for decides to field a team, it might make sense to root for your group… and groups of people might come together for other reasons that bind them and sponsor sports teams. I could see it making sense in many ways – but the idea of nation-states co-opting this process and turning it into a vehicle for political propaganda is just awful.”