Hefty price tag for shot at glory
By the time you read this it will be all over bar the shouting, the debriefs, the disbeliefs, the recriminations, the raised hopes, dashed hopes, counting the medals, counting the money.
Yet another Olympics has come and gone. This one had everything: drug cheats, fear of diseases, robberies, fake robberies and snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
One of the most bizarre episodes would have to be the post-shotput interview with Val Adams who won the silver medal, conducted in subdued tones as if there had been a death in the family. What is that all about?
It’s about many things, one of which is sports journos who need to get a life. It’s also about a small country with an inferiority complex compensated for via a manic sports obsession which results in rarking up the odds, the expectations, massaging the emotional investment to an absurd degree.
One wonders, sometimes, about the Olympic thing, particularly the inordinate cost. Here is Brazil, not the wealthiest country in the world, spending squillions of dollars on what amounts to a 10-day bash; a gargantuan expenditure to treat a small group of privileged people, paid by the state, to do what they like doing – running, jumping etc.
And excuse me for being a purist, but the events themselves, some of them at least, would have the ancient Greeks laughing into their wine goblets – synchronised swimming, golf, volleyball, mountain biking and a dozen other additions to the growing Olympic tally. Perhaps the time has come for this behemoth to be put to bed, scaled back, or, as was suggested to me, returned to the Greeks on each occasion to save costs and the near bankruptcy of nations who indulge in it simply to satisfy the egos of politicians and sports administrators.
That said, there were some fine moments at the Rio Games, the finest perhaps exhibited by New Zealand runner Nikki Hamblin and the American, Abbey D’Agostino who were involved in a fall in the 5000-metre heats. Both women stopped to help each other and finished the race, coming last. In doing so they finished first in the true sporting stakes. Gold medal to both for exceptional benevolence in the line of charity.
Last in the morality stakes would be the questions that surround possible corruption charges connected to federal funds employed in cleaning up the heavily polluted Guanabara Bay used for Olympic sailing. The foul odour of price fixing, kickbacks and bribes hangs in the air over this matter.
Closely followed into second to last place would be the IOC member arrested for ticket scalping, pipping at the post the lunging at the line American swimmer who invented a story about being robbed. Muscular prowess in the water but ethically lame on the land.
All the world’s a stage and we saw the best and worst that the human species has to offer, strutting their way across it at these Games.
This Olympics will be best remembered most, of course, for the exclusion of the Russian contingent, caught out for systematic drug doping of its athletes.
Looking down a very long list of recent doping cases in athletics where names and country of origin were given, I was pleased to observe that New Zealand came up only once. But a high proportion came from the communist states. Gotta beat those decadent bourgeois capitalists, even if we have to cheat.
The Rio Games included more than 90 competitors previously punished for doping offences; that’s the ones who were caught out. A Kenyan athletics coach was sent home after posing as an athlete during a doping test, while the same country’s track and field manager was caught out offering athletes advanced notice of pending tests in return for monetary payment. You couldn’t make this stuff up.
An Irish boxer, Bulgarian steeplechaser, Chinese and Greek swimmers, Brazilian cyclist, Cyprian and Polish weightlifters were all sent packing for failing drug tests this time round.
Across the world, Russia and Turkey come up as the worst nations for doping in sport. Both secular and religious states thus compete for the cheating prize. No ethical difference between them. We’ll all draw our own conclusions from that.
Countless rows of empty seats in various stadiums also raise questions surrounding this spectacle which has become a gigantic platform to generate fervid nationalistic chest beating.
On the positive side, nice to see some of the New Zealand contingent visit the poorer parts of Rio and engage with the locals for whom the Games were an extravagant waste of money and resources.
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