Apparently the Olympic Games are well under way.
I wouldn’t know, because I am doing what I do every four years and roundly ignoring the whole thing.
Ben Johnson blew it for me at the Seoul games in 1988 when he won the men's 100-metre gold medal, setting a world record in the process, and was promptly disqualified for failing a drugs test.
I was a fairly naïve young man at the time and was sickened by the subsequent revelation that athletes taking performance-enhancing substances was more common than it wasn’t.
Now, of course, drug-taking in sport is rife, and athletes go to extraordinary lengths to prepare for events by taking carefully coordinated concoctions of stimulants and supplements, and, of course, trying desperately hard not get caught doing so.
Hardly sportsmanlike, is it? Level playing field? What’s that?
Then, along came professionalism in the Olympics, and that put the tin lid on it all for me. While I usually won’t hear a word against the great Scottish hero Andy Murray, what on earth is he doing there?
He’s a multi-millionaire professional athlete who was competing at money-spinning Wimbledon just a few weeks ago. Playing tennis is his job, it’s his career, it’s his life and he’s very good at it.
I have clearly laboured under the misapprehension that the Olympics was meant to be about icons like Eric Liddell, a Christian missionary and part-time rugby player who fitted running very quickly (although not on Sundays) into a busy life and never got paid a penny for it.
He was the real deal. He was an amateur who was pretty good at quite a few things, one of which happened to be an Olympic sport.
Have I got that all wrong? I was always under the impression that the Olympics were for people like him, those who espoused the whole Corinthian ethos where shopkeepers and lollipop ladies could don spikes, vest and shorts and run about a lot, swim and chuck things.
And then the whole gender thing hove into view, and who qualified for what team, to turn out in which event, where and when and against whom became the issue, and I just lost interest.
And while we’re at it, there is no way things like BMX biking and skateboarding should be Olympic events (you’ll note I don’t use the word ‘sports’ here). I mean, the winners of those contests can never rightfully share a podium with true Olympians like Jesse Owens or Mark Spitz.
Like it does in most modern sports, money and cheating rule the day, and the Olympics are as faux as it gets.
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