Rio was just the wrong place, at the wrong time
THE Olympic Games should always be held in London.
This has been abundantly clear since as far back as 2012, when the Games were an enormous success on every level and particularly so for Irish viewers who had full access to the BBC’s multi-screen coverage via the red button.
What a thing it was, to be able to skip across six different events of your own choosing, zapper at the ready, killing anything that made a wrong move, anything that was even slightly boring — and at a proper time too, British Summer Time.
It’s not just that Rio has been happening at the wrong time and the wrong place for most of us — it seems to be happening at the wrong time and the wrong place for the people of Rio, who are either too poor to buy tickets for the main stadium, or who couldn’t be bothered now that the football is starting again.
I sensed that the Brazilians would not fall in love with these Games from the moment in the opening ceremony when supermodel Gisele Bundchen marched out to the sounds of The Girl From Ipanema, missing the languid spirit of the original by such a distance it was a display which could only be described as an outbreak of corporate entertainment. And it’s always going to be a long way back from that.
Out on the streets or in thNe icgoerllr a idLoarws soo f n thHeicfiienneds a t ehroctiealms the Brazilian police would tell dyoes u ttrhuam tt rhe e m Gia n meset s , jiul sm tm odeians a lot more work for them; thaq t ua if tu it r waua t s faulwgiat ya s tuhrenln d kik n l the same city, like, say, London, at least one enormous source of bribery and corruption would automatically be removed.
Not that more sources would not be found, but still... what have the Japanese had to pay to “entertain” the blazers in advance of the next games in Tokyo, which for Irish viewers will be screened at even more unwatchable times than Rio? Can the Japanese not just acknowledge that their needs are less important than ours and run their events in the middle of the Tokyo night?
Because to run another Olympics that is largely unwatched by the rich people in the western world might conceivably mean that top IOC folk at the Games will have to take a reduction in their €900 a day expenses — and who wants that?
Perhaps as a response to these basic structural flaws, we Irish have had to make our own entertainment — indeed like the imaginative child who finds a box left over from the birthday party, we always seem to make something quite interesting out of the most unpromising materials. Maybe too interesting, indeed, betimes. And RTE is always there with its massive presence on the ground, leaving its own legacy which, on this occasion, consists mainly of two things: a firm resolution on the part of some of the Rio delegation that this will be their last Olympics, that they’re just can’t cope with the disruption to their happy lives when Paddy is bringing his A-game to the world; and at home, the emergence of Joanne Cantwell as a most relaxing presenter.
Which is a powerful endorsement, given that so many presenters make us stop relaxing in ways that they clearly don’t understand, and which we ourselves hardly understand either — all we know is that most of the time we are in a state of agitation over something, some note in the voice perhaps which disturbs us; a creeping sense that this person might at any moment read out the wrong result of a football match and not realise that this is a terrible thing.
Indeed it is only when a presenter such as Cantwell, pictured left, frees us of such anxieties that we realise how much stress we are under at other times, how much we have to endure from the stop-relaxing brigade, in all their manifestations.
I don’t know how we do it. But there was a bit of luck involved here too, with Cantwell’s afternoon stint turning into the prime time slot due to the rowing and the cheating and the latest reports coming out of the Rio police department.
If they’d put her on for the “main” events on the track, she would hardly have been seen at all.