THE OTHER OLYMPICS
Every country loves to root for its hometown heroes, hoping they’ll win the gold. But the real joy of the Olympics is watching the world’s finest compete in a politics-free atmosphere. Right? Well, not necessarily.
BACKGROUND
In December 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in an attempt to bolster that country’s faltering communist government. The spread of Communism and a Soviet Union that aggressively perpetuated it were the two biggest fears of the West. The Afghanistan invasion both concerned and infuriated United States President Jimmy Carter. He condemned it in the United Nations, and made a bold statement in his 1980 State of the Union address: If Soviet troops remained in Afghanistan past February 20, the United States—and many of its allies—would boycott the upcoming Summer Olympics, scheduled to be held in Moscow.
Soviet troops did not budge. And so, on March 21, 1980, Carter announced that the United States would not participate in the 1980 Summer Olympics. Soon, 62 more countries, including Canada, West Germany, and Japan, followed suit, supporting the boycott by pledging that they wouldn’t send any athletes to Moscow either. (A few of those 62 countries probably couldn’t really afford to send Olympians, and adding themselves to the boycott roll was a great way to both save face and earn American favor.)
American athletes—some of whom had been training their whole lives to reach the Olympics—were devastated, and Carter personally addressed 150 of them to explain his difficult decision. While the U.S.S.R. didn’t succumb to the political pressure of the boycott (it didn’t withdraw from Afghanistan until 1988), the Olympics definitely suffered. With nearly half the industrialized world refusing to compete, the Games were not a full picture of world-class sports… and besides that, the loss of vital Olympics-and tourism-generated revenue was costing Moscow billions.
THE LIBERTY BELL CLASSIC
But from something bad came something good. After Carter failed to rally international support for a full alternative Olympics in the Ivory Coast, the U.S. Track & Field organization decided to step in and create an alternative competition for the track-and-field athletes who’d been shut out because of politics. (Athletes competing in other events were out of luck.) On July 16, 1980, three days before the opening ceremonies of the Moscow Olympics, athletes from 29 boycotting nations met on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia for the Liberty Bell Classic, more popularly known as the Olympic Boycott Games.
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LET THE GAMES BEGIN
The United States, Canada, China, West Germany, Egypt, Thailand, the Bahamas, Kenya, and Sudan, among others, competed in 33 track-and-field events over the course of a week—19 for men and 14 for women. The results of the Liberty Bell Classic (LBC) indicate that had there been no boycott, there would have been some truly exciting Olympic events. For example, American runner Renaldo Nehemiah completed the 110m hurdles in 13.31 seconds, which was a faster time than the actual Olympic gold medalist, East German runner Thomas Munkelt. The United States dominated the LBC, taking 20 gold medals, 23 silver, and 14 bronze; Canada took 5 gold, 5 silver, and 4 bronze; and Thailand, China, Kenya, and the Bahamas also took home multiple gold medals.
SECOND BOYCOTT
As the 1984 Summer Olympics approached, the world wondered how the Soviet Union would respond to the boycott of its 1980 games, especially since they would be held in Los Angeles. Not surprisingly, on May 8, 1984, the U.S.S.R. announced that it would not send athletes to the United States. Joining them were 13 other communist, Eastern Bloc, and Soviet-influenced nations: East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Cuba, Afghanistan, North Korea, Vietnam, Mongolia, Angola, Ethiopia, and Laos. Iran and Libya, not communist, but anti-America for other reasons, joined in the boycott.
And just as the United States had done in 1980, the Soviet Union planned an alternate Olympics for its athletes. But unlike the track-only Liberty Bell Classic, the 1984 alternate Olympics was huge in scope, nearly on par with the real Olympic games that were taking place on the other side of the world.
Saddam Hussein’s favorite American foods: Raisin Bran and Doritos.
DRUZHBA-84
The Druzhba (“Friendship”) Games featured events in 23 sports, including track and field, basketball, field hockey, rowing, swimming, weightlifting, gymnastics, boxing, water polo, archery, handball, judo, pentathlon, tennis, and equestrian events. More than 2,300 athletes competed in the two-monthlong games.
Unlike the Olympics, usually held in and around a single city, “Druzhba-84” spread events around 17 cities in nine countries, in order to demonstrate the unity of the communist world…and also to share the cost. It even looked like the Olympics. The opening ceremonies took place in the packed Grand Arena of the Central Lenin Stadium in Moscow where the Olympic cauldron from the 1980 games was, once again, reverently lit with a torch.
As in the 1980 alternate games, the nonparticipation of hundreds of the world’s greatest athletes cast a shadow on the results of the “real” Olympics. For example, Mary Lou Retton was the star of the 1984 Olympics when she became the first American woman to score a perfect 10 and win an individual gold medal. While Retton may have been a stellar athlete, no American woman had yet won a gold medal in gymnastics because the Soviet Union had, up to that point, completely dominated the sport. Had she competed against Soviet gymnasts, Retton may not have made history.
Retton wasn’t the only example. Of the 41 track and field events and 29 swimming competitions that were held at both the 1984 Olympics and Druzhba-84, the communists outperformed their Olympic counterparts in 20 track events and 11 swimming events.
SPIRIT OF THE GAMES
There have been no significant boycotts or alternate Olympics since. Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union improved in the late 1980s, and the Soviet Union (as well as communism in Europe) collapsed in 1991. There are still communist countries, of course, and they still compete in the Olympics—Cuba and North Korea, for example, and China, which even hosted the 2008 games. After the two boycotts, nations have put aside their political differences to compete in friendly sports… which, after all, is the entire point of the Olympics.
Hippocrates believed that constipation was caused by the north wind.
13 FACTS ABOUT THE
WITCH HAZEL TREE
An amazing product from the pharmacy of Mother Nature.
• It’s actually more of a shrub, usually reaching just 10 to 20 feet in height. It grows in the eastern U.S. and Canada, China, and Japan.
• The witch hazel sold in drugstores is a distillation of the plant’s branches combined with alcohol. It’s an astringent (it shrinks body tissue) with a variety of modern uses, but it had ancient uses, too.
• Native Americans brewed curative teas and medicines from its leaves and bark.
• The Cree called their brew “Magic Water” and used it for colds, coughs, and dysentery.
• The Osage put shemba, a poultice of the leaves, on sores, ulcers, boils, and tumors.
• The Potawatomi treated backaches and sore muscles with a liniment made from witch hazel bark.
• The Mohegan concocted remedies from its leaves and stems to treat insect bites, bruises, and cuts.
• English settlers named it the “wych hazel” tree in the 1600s. Wych is a Middle English term meaning “flexible” or “pliable,” and it referred to the plant’s branches, which were used as dowsing rods to locate water underground.
• It was named wych hazel because its leaves resemble those of the hazelnut tree.
• In 1846 Theron Pond of Utica, New York, and an Oneida medicine man sold a witch hazel skin cream called Golden Treasure. It became Pond’s Vanishing Cream, which is still sold today.
• Witch hazel tincture shrinks hemorrhoids, varicose veins, and bags under the eyes. (Grandpa Uncle John swears by it as an aftershave lotion.)
• It also soothes di
aper rash, razor burn, and sunburn and takes the itch out of poison ivy and poison oak.
• Witch hazel seeds are said to taste like pistachios.
Manhattan has more Subway sandwich shops (171) than subway stations (147).
A HISTORY OF THE
SHOPPING MALL, PART IV
The shopping mall has been such a central part of American consumer culture for so many years that it’s hard to believe their days could be numbered. But that’s what some retailing experts think. Here’s Part IV of our story; Part III is on page 399.
FINISHING TOUCHES
Victor Gruen may well be considered the “father of the mall,” but he didn’t remain a doting dad for long. Southdale Center, the world’s first enclosed shopping mall, opened its doors in the fall of 1956, and by 1968 Gruen had turned publicly and vehemently against his creation.
So it would fall to other early mall builders, people such as A. Alfred Taubman, Melvin Simon, and Edward J. DeBartolo Sr., to give the shopping mall its modern, standardized form, by taking what they understood about human nature and applying it to Gruen’s original concept. In the process, they fine-tuned the mall into the highly effective, super-efficient “shopping machines” that have dominated American retailing for nearly half a century.
BACK TO BASICS
These developers saw shopping malls the same way that Gruen did, as idealized versions of downtown shopping districts. Working from that starting point, they set about systematically removing all distractions, annoyances, and other barriers to consumption. Your local mall may not contain all of the following features, but there should be much here that looks familiar:
• It’s a truism among mall developers that most shoppers will only walk about three city blocks—about 1,000 feet—before they begin to feel a need to head back to where they’d started. So 1,000 feet became a standard length for malls.
• Most of the stairs, escalators, and elevators are located at the ends of the mall, not in the center. This is done to encourage shoppers to walk past all the stores on the level they’re on before visiting shops on another level.
In 1968 Steven Spielberg and George Lucas took a directing class taught by Jerry Lewis.
• Malls are usually built with shops on two levels, not one or three. This way, if a shopper walks the length of the mall on one level to get to the escalator, then walks the length of the mall on the second level to return to where they started, they’ve walked past every store in the mall and are back where they parked their car. (If there was a third level of shops, a shopper who walked all three levels would finish up at the opposite end of the mall, three city blocks away from where they parked.)
• Another truism among mall developers is that people, like water, tend to flow down more easily than they flow up. Because of this, many malls are designed to encourage people to park and enter the mall on the upper level, not the lower level, on the theory they are more likely to travel down to visit stores on a lower level than travel up to visit stores on a higher level.
THE VISION THING
• Great big openings are designed into the floor that separates the upper level of shops from the lower level. That allows shoppers to see stores on both levels from wherever they happen to be in the mall. The handrails that protect shoppers from falling into the openings are made of glass or otherwise designed so that they don’t obstruct the sight lines to those stores.
• Does your mall’s decor seem dull to you? That’s no accident—the interior of the mall is designed to be aesthetically pleasing but not particularly interesting, so as not to distract shoppers from looking at the merchandise, which is much more important.
• Skylights flood the interiors of malls with natural light, but these skylights are invariably recessed in deep wells to keep direct sunlight from reflecting off of storefront glass, which would create glare and distract shoppers from looking at the merchandise. The wells also contain artificial lighting that comes on late in the day when the natural light begins to fade, to prevent shoppers from receiving a visual cue that it’s time to go home.
A NEIGHBORLY APPROACH
• Great attention is paid to the placement of stores within the mall, something that mall managers refer to as “adjacencies.” The price of merchandise, as well as the type, factors into this equation: There’s not much point in placing a store that sells $200 silk ties next to one that sells $99 men’s suits.
The Pentagon has 14 fast-food restaurants, including McDonald’s, KFC, and Dunkin’ Donuts.
• Likewise, any stores that give off strong smells, like restaurants and hair salons, are kept away from jewelry and other high-end stores. (Would you want to smell cheeseburgers or fried fish while you and your fiancé are picking out your wedding rings?)
• Have you ever bought milk, raw meat, or a gallon of ice cream at the mall? Probably not, and there’s a good reason for it: Malls generally do not lease space to stores that sell perishable goods, because once you buy them you have to take them right home, instead of spending more time shopping at the mall.
• Consumer tastes change over time, and mall operators worry about falling out of fashion with shoppers. Because of this, they keep a close watch on individual store sales. Even if a store in the mall is profitable, if it falls below its “tenant profile,” or average sales per square foot of other stores in the same retail category, the mall operator may refuse to renew its lease. Tenant turnover at a well-managed mall can run as high as 10 percent a year.
HERE, THERE, EVERYWHERE
Malls have been a part of the American landscape for so long now that a little “mall fatigue” is certainly understandable. But like so much of American culture, the concept has been exported to foreign countries, and malls remain very popular around the world, where they are built not just in the suburbs but in urban centers as well. They have achieved the sort of iconic status once reserved for airports, skyscrapers, and large government buildings. They are the kind of buildings created by emerging societies to communicate to the rest of the world, “We have arrived.” If you climb into a taxicab in almost any major city in the world, be it Moscow, Kuala Lumpur, Dubai, or Shanghai, and tell the driver, “Take me to the mall,” he’ll know where to go.
KILL ’EM MALL
America’s love-hate relationship with shopping malls is now more than half a century old, and for as long as it has been fashionable to see malls as unfashionable, people have been predicting their demise. In the 1970s, “category killers” were seen as a threat. Stand-alone stores like Toys “R” Us focused on a single category of goods, offering a greater selection at a lower price than even the biggest stores in the mall couldn’t match. They were soon followed by “power centers,” strip malls anchored by “big box” stores like Walmart, and discount warehouse stores like Costco and Sam’s Club. In the early 1990s, TV shopping posed a threat, only to fizzle out…and be replaced by even stronger competition posed by Internet retailers like Amazon.com.
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By the early 1990s, construction of new malls in the United States had slowed to a crawl, but this had as much to do with rising real estate prices (land in the suburbs wasn’t dirt cheap anymore), the savings and loan crisis (which made construction financing harder to come by), and the fact that most communities that wanted a mall already had one…or two…or more.
Increasing competition from other retailers and bad economic times in recent years have also taken their toll, resulting in declining sales per square foot and rising vacancy rates in malls all over the country. In 2009 General Growth Properties, the nation’s second-largest mall operator, filed for bankruptcy; it was the largest real estate bankruptcy in American history.
FULL CIRCLE
But mall builders and operators keep fighting back, continually reinventing themselves as they try to keep pace with the times. Open-air malls are remade into enclosed malls, and enclosed malls are opened to th
e fresh air. One strategy tried in Kansas, Georgia, and other areas is to incorporate shopping centers into larger mixed-use developments that include rental apartments, condominiums, office buildings, and other offerings. Legacy Town Center, a 150-acre development in the middle of a 2,700-acre business park north of Dallas, for example, includes 80 outdoor shops and restaurants, 1,500 apartments and townhouses, two office towers, a Marriott Hotel, a landscaped park with hiking trails, and a lake. (Sound familiar?)
In other words, developers are trying to save the mall by finally building them just the way that Victor Gruen wanted to in the first place.
Poll results: 58% of Americans have called in sick to work when they weren’t.
CHILDREN OF THE CORN
There are an estimated 35 million teenagers in the United States today, and they are a lucrative target for merchandisers because they have lots of disposable income (more than $100 a week, on average). Believe it or not, a lot of the social science that marketers use to spot teenage trends and cash in on them comes from a farm study done in the 1920s.
THE FARM REPORT
In 1928 an improved strain of hybrid corn seed became available to farmers in Green County, Iowa. Around that same time, a pair of University of Iowa sociologists named Neal C. Gross and Bruce Ryan began a study of how the new seed was being adopted by farmers in the area. Gross and Ryan tracked 259 farmers in all, and the study they published, “The Diffusion of Corn in Two Iowa Communities,” laid the groundwork for a theory of consumer behavior that describes when, how, and why human beings embrace new products and ideas. It turns out that some of the concepts they developed apply as much to modern teenagers as they did to Iowa corn farmers 80 years ago.
FOLLOW THE LEADERS
The new hybrid corn seed offered greater resistance to drought and disease, and it increased crop yields by as much as 20%. Even so, it took almost 15 years for all of the farmers to switch to the new seeds. Gross and Ryan divided them into several groups:
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