We’d be better off without the Olympics

For most of my time in school, I seemed to get sick right around the Winter Olympics. This was convenient because staring glassy-eyed at the television, watching people ski over and over again down a hill littered with flimsy gates, was a good minimally taxing distraction.

The 2016 Summer Games served a similar purpose for the adult me — a nasty case of strep throat corresponded with the Rio de Janeiro Olympics, allowing me to break up long stretches of feverish sleep by gazing, from my bed, at volleyballs flying back and forth over nets, with fit people in bathing suits running around and falling down in the sand in the background.

Other than acting as a useful tool for convalescence, though, the Olympic Games are not very fun.

In fairness, there are people who are truly into the games. Many women are perversely fascinated with the perfect, puberty-delayed girls competing fiercely and injuring themselves repeatedly in women’s gymnastics, for example. (Not that I’d know anything about that.) But on balance, we’d be better off without the Olympics, especially now that we only get a couple of years break between them. That’s not enough time to forget that they aren’t as fun as we pretend they are.

Even though the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Games haven’t even started as of this writing, they have already helped prove my point. Over 40 Winter Olympic security guards there have been hit by a norovirus outbreak, forcing South Korea to take all 1,200 guards off the job (to prevent spreading the sickness) and replace them with 900 members of the military. Norovirus, you may recall, also goes by the charming name “winter vomiting bug” — an accurate moniker — and is highly contagious. Olympic organizers are now busy getting buses That means putting people at risk for everything from respiratory infections to typhoid.

In Rio, the concern was the Zika virus, which causes severe birth defects in babies infected in utero and, in very rare cases, triggers paralysis in adults. Zika virus is a mosquito-borne disease, but it out 450,000 condoms (sustainably produced ones at that), which amounted to 42 condoms per athlete.

Perhaps that helps explain why Zika does not seem to have caused problems at the Rio Olympics, where people were either not infected at all, or infected without knowing or reporting it, since Zika usually causes mild or no symptoms. But according to a group of researchers from the University of Utah and the U.S. Olympic Committee who tested U.S. Olympians, Paralympians and staff when they returned from the games, these Americans got other infectious keepsakes from Rio, including chikungunya, dengue fever and West Nile virus.

The Pyeongchang Olympics offer a special bonus: the threat of a nuclear attack! With North Korea only 80 kilometres away, there’s a small but real possibility that Kim Jong Un will try to wreak havoc with the Games by launching a missile or conducting a nuclear test. What would happen next is anyone’s guess, but it’s unlikely to be anything good.

Not that trying to blow up the Olympics is something new. It’s been over 20 years since domestic U.S. terrorist Eric Robert Rudolph bombed Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta during the 1996 Summer Games. Two people died (one of a heart attack after the explosion). Many more would have perished if not for a security guard named Richard Jewell who found the bomb and cleared most people out of the park before the explosive device was detonated. In return for his good deed, Jewell endured weeks of media reports inaccurately implying that he was the bomber.

Take all of that and add in corruption, bribes, head injuries, doping scandals and the painful absurdity of the International Olympic Committee (whose goal is to “promote Olympism in society,” and it becomes clear the world should just take a big pass on the games from now on. Recovering shut-ins will find other forms of entertainment.