Olympic ‘morals’ still reek after Rio

A FEW final reflections on those glorious Olympic Games.

Have we reached Peak Medal Haul? And, if so, will our strategy to overtake the USA rely on us persuading the IOC to introduce cake-baking and ballroom dancing as events?

Can someone have a word with the Brexiteers taking credit for our gold-fest, claiming that impending liberation from Brussels restored our athletes’ faith in Empire and the need to give Johnny Foreigner a thrashing.

Maybe they’d like to revisit that claim in four years, after our national debt has soared so much we had to divert all the Lottery sports funding into our hospitals to plug the gaping hole in the lie that leaving Europe would make the NHS £350million a week better off.

And I know it’s still the silly season, but please can we be spared those corny, preachy columns on how footballers aren’t fit to lace an Olympian’s spikes. The ones that say football is morally bankrupt while the Olympics is beyond reproach.

Tell that to defeated Irishman Michael Conlan, who climbed out of the ring to say amateur boxing in Rio was corrupt to the core, to the paralympians, who’ve had money embezzled from them and been left to feel like unwanted afterthoughts, to the semi-naked Mongolian wrestling coaches, who protested at what they saw as bent judging, and anyone who finished fourth behind a Russian and thought that could very well turn out to be a bronze once the dope tests are in.

As Gary Lineker rightly tweeted, the lazy fouryearly comparison between angelic Olympians and Satanic footballers is “dull and sanctimonious bull **** ”.