The village is in a terrible state. The host city is woefully unprepared. The IOC is soft on Russian doping and the Russians are fairly relaxed about that.
The whole enterprise is entirely beholden to corporate interests, everyone is going to die of Zika, and as if that all weren’t bad enough, Sonny Bill Williams is pissed off at us.
All in all, the Rio Olympics look set to be utterly catastrophic.
The great Olympic movement, begun in 1896 when Pierre de Coubertin found a ‘Life in Ancient Greece’ picture book in his son’s bin, is crumbling before our eyes.
And it’s assisting in its own destruction, with its wanton indulgence of cheats and liars and golfers. There may be no hope left for the starry-eyed ideals that we once looked to the Games to uphold.
Is there even any point in watching the big stupid mess?
Yes. Dammit, yes, there is.
Because however corrupt, however disappointing, however dirty and tainted and obscenely detached from the misery and squalor and degradation taking place just outside the poorly-constructed stadia within which its farcical irrelevancies play out, it is still the Olympics. And even if every four years it seems to mean a little bit less, it still means something.
Even if it’s all too easy to roll our eyes at the preening entitlement of Bronte Campbell calling the London Games “the failure we had to have“, Rio will still see some wide-eyed amateur on their first overseas trip, having trained on their own without coaches or government funding, diving into the pool with no hope in hell of ending up on the podium, flailing their way down the pool with more gusto than the whole Australian team put together.
Because even if it’s incredibly irritating watching the stars of tennis and golf stroll through the Games like a Sunday picnic – a relaxing break from the business of playing in tournaments they actually care about and rolling naked on beds of money – there are still stony-broke badminton and volleyball players who will only be noticed by the world for a few minutes and then swiftly forgotten. The ones who work themselves into the ground with disturbingly single-minded intensity, for no reward other than a single shot to make a dream come true every four years.
Because amid all the awful hype and hypocrisy and cringe-inducing extraneous garbage, these Olympics – like any Olympics – retain the potential for moments. For Cathy Freeman or the Miracle on Ice. For Muhammad Ali or Tommie Smith and John Carlos. For Eddie the Eagle or Eric the Eel. For the wondrous joy of Sally Pearson and Jai Taurima, or the wrenching heartbreak of Shane Kelly or Jane Saville.
And if sometimes the moments we love turn out to be a lie, if we find ourselves, on occasion, disillusioned by the likes of Marion Jones or Ben Johnson or the entire Russian nation, then that is the price we pay for our quadrennial flashes of inspiration.
The message of the Olympics has always been: if you can’t handle me at my Tyson Gay, you don’t deserve me at my Gillian Rolton. And it’s true, we don’t.
So yes, I will still be watching these Olympics. In this sad old world we need all the uplift we can get, and as long as there is one Olympian who isn’t a cheat or a criminal or a racist or a violent psychopath, the Games will remain the best place to find it.
Not the golf though. The golf can go to hell.
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