O'Lympic Games

It's refreshing to know that naive individuals still exist who believe in the tooth fairy, Santa Claus and the Olympic games. Individuals such as Dennis Altman, in his article "The Olympic spirit? It's a simple, shared global experience" on http://www.onlineopinion.com.au of 22 August 2008.

"The real importance of the Games is that it brings together almost every country in the world," says Dennis.

And he's right. It does bring them together, in one place at one time, where they can indulge in an orgy of nationalistic strutting, braying and one-upmanship. The competition between individual athletes in pursuit of sports excellence, personal best achievements and world records is lost in a cacophony of international posturing.

And who wins? OK, Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt (a case for nominative pre-determinism if ever there was one) did great things as individuals, but right up there with their achievements is the trumpeting that one is American, and one is Jamaican. And everyone knows the Americans are there to get more medals than anyone else. And Jamaica wants to show how wonderful it is for winning so much as a small country.

“Yo, Jamaican sprinters [are] taking over the world!' " Bolt said after his team won the gold medal in the 4x100m relay, "We're taking over forever.”

But it was all for nothing, the Chinese swamped the event in a gold avalanche. Britain did really well too after mediocre showings in recent years. They didn’t get there on chariots of fire though, but on a massive A$1 billion dollar Olympic budget. Because you can just forget all about the virtues of amateur competition, money doesn’t just talk, it shouts.

Who can guess how many zillion yuans China poured into their Olympic team to change them from ping pong specialists to table-topping world beaters. They won’t be telling us any time soon, you can bet on that. The East Germans knew all about that during the Cold War, 40 gold medals from a population of 16 million -- even the Brothers Grimm could have seen through their amateur status.

And don’t think Australia is squeaky clean. After failing to win a single gold medal in the 1976 Montreal Olympics, the government created the Australian Institute of Sport, chucked a whole bunch of money at anything promising and before you can say Crikey! the old lucky country finds a pot of gold medals at the end of its well-funded rainbow.

But if there’s one thing dirtier about the Olympics than filthy lucre, it’s drugs. Sure, they test all the athletes for all sorts of detectable performance-enhancing substances, and they probably even asked Scottish pentathlete Stephanie Cook for a wee sample. Unfortunately there’s more than one way of skinning a dope and history shows us old tired, cynics that some of those medals will be handed back in disgrace when it turns out that someone’s mum gave them weight loss pills that perhaps they should have checked more closely.



Just look at some of those Chinese swimmers at the Asian Games in 1990 (pictured left -- yes, it's a she). Quicker than a plate of Sang Choy Bow arriving at the Golden Dragon, Chinese chicks with shoulders like rugby front rowers are knocking over records left, right and centre. Actually, more like left and far left. As soon as they started testing for steroids, wallop, they're back down the bottom of the table. They've obviously learned a lot since then.

Then there was Ben Johnson, Carl Lewis, Marion Jones – you can be excused for wondering if there was anyone at any recent Olympics who WASN'T on drugs!

Just before the Olympics, a whole bunch of Russians were banned. Drug testers became suspicious of how co-operative the Russians were until they found out that Russian customs was tipping the athletes off when the testers arrived for their “surprise” visits. The authorities started DNA testing the supplied urine sample and found none of them came from athletes who had supposedly been tested. The 13th commandment -- thou shalt not get caught.

Usian Bolt? London to a brick....

The Olympics are a travesty of nationalism, money and drugs. The only thing they bring together is spin doctors, bankers and drug pushers. Put the trillions into a few peripheral luxuries like food, medicine and shelter for people who can’t afford a TV to watch overpaid teenagers splash gaily around in high tech swimsuits that cost more than a third world farmer earns in his lifetime.

Either that or go back to the original Olympic games of 400BC. And I’m not just saying that so the beach volleyballers have to perform naked.