Olympics pooper

from ldngames.co.uk

I am an Olympics pooper. I have no interest in the Olympics, I don’t care who wins what or how they win it. To me it's just a very expensive series of TV shows with live audiences.

I’m not anti-sport – I like sport, but I don’t like the glitz, celebrity worship, drugs, deceit, corruption and shameless manipulation of the global sporting industry.

I don’t like the way politicians with shiny shoes embarrass us by climbing laboriously onto the bandwagon. I don’t like the circus atmosphere, the whipping up of emotions, the childish antics of winners, the pitiful tears of losers, the endless banal interviews with dull sporting fanatics.

Sport is good, but the Olympics isn’t sport, it’s a circus. It’s a degrading circus too, because all is so deliberate and contrived and so very far removed from the simple exhilaration of running, jumping, swimming and the innocent pleasure of training hand and eye to do what once upon a time they could never do.

It’s even worse than that though, because part of me is amused by the bungling over security, the ludicrous cost escalation and everything that doesn’t quite go according to plan. Part of me hopes the whole thing will be a shambles and that’s not good because I shouldn’t see it like that.

I’m not a vindictive person, but they go too far, make too much of their circus, praise the performers too highly, treat the thing too seriously, spend too much of our money, fail to acknowledge how corrupt it all is, how they never get on top of the drugs issue, try to involve absolutely everyone with their infantile games.

Don't like the Olympics? Wow - how weird is that?

Always, always, always children have to be roped in, their innocence shaming the adults who could never imitate what children naturally possess. 

There’s something rotten about the Olympics. Many of us know it and I suspect our number grows year on year. Maybe one day the fat men in suits will have to do something about the monster they have helped created and on which they so gluttonously feed, but I doubt it.