Hoping for the dope-lympics

I’VE always been baffled by the month-long hiatus between the Olympics and the Paralympics.

As an armchair sports fan, there’s not much better than an Olympic summer, when you can sit around and get totally absorbed in Tae Kwon Do, or Modern Pentathlon, or some new sport you’ve barely heard of and will inevitably forget about until the next games.

By coincidence, I was on holiday for a couple of weeks during the Games, and it felt like I watched every shot, dive, jump, punch and throw.

It’s always the stories behind the competitors that make the games – the swimmer who learned in his country’s only Olympic pool, the athlete who tried to qualify for six Olympiads in a row, the refugees who overcame enormous odds.

This time round, those stories were only made more compelling, with so many athletes forced to train in their garages or on living room floors, as sporting venues around the world closed their doors.

But what I’ve always found odd is that they gather all the best athletes for this huge festival, at colossal expense, everyone has a great time, and then we all just twiddle our thumbs for a month.

The Commonwealth Games manage to hold all the para sports simultaneously, yet after the Olympics there’s just this weird time in the doldrums.

It would be far better, in my opinion, to capitalise on the hype and go straight into the para sports.

But if the organisers really can’t manage to hold two events back to back then I think I’ve got the perfect solution – a third games between the two. The doping Olympics.

You can picture the advertising slogans now – “Ever wanted to watch a woman bench press seven cars?

“From the team who brought you the Olympics and the Paralympics comes a new, drugtaking free for all. The high-as-akite-lympics.”

Doping has been so rife in sport for so many years, that it would be great to watch it without having to wonder whether athletes were cheating.

Take away doping controls altogether and you’d be sure that everyone was taking as many performance-enhancing drugs as they could find.

You’d have gymnasts with pupils the size of dinner plates doing 12 backflips from a standing start, and marathon runners sprinting 26 miles as though it were the 100 metres.

Let’s be honest, there have been times watching the supposedly drug-free games when it’s felt like we were watching the dope-lympics anyway.