Olympic Games fever unrelenting

I’ve never been one to get too jazzed about an impending Olympic competition.

My sporting tastes are comparable to the preferences of those seedy old blokes trolling Oxford street in the early hours of Sunday morning, in that I like my sport with balls.

Granted Handball, Ping-pong and possibly Shotput could all argue their way into my interests through technicalities, but they hardly wet the whistle like the State of Origin, a Rugby World Cup or a great summer of Cricket.

And yes, even the greatest game of all has been an Olympic staple since 1900, but it now exists as some weird youth Football competition with a splattering of geriatrics and the fact it is Beckham-less makes it strangely even less palatable (excuse me while I scrub myself clean).

It has been this way since as long as I can remember.

Even in the lead up to Sydney 2000 I can recall incurring the wrath of my Mother, someone whose passion for sport and unbridled patriotism makes the Olympics the highpoint of every four years, when I donned a homemade ‘F*** the Olympics’ t-shirt.

It was crude, direct and lacked even the slightest hint of irony, yet at the time it was my only amour against the relentless hype that engulfed our nation in the weeks preceeding the Games.

But I stood there, happily corrected and considerably inebriated, as the Sydney 2000 party brought about some of the best memories of my late teenage years.

Juan Antonio Samarach’s proclamation of the ‘best ever Olympics’ resonated with me like a sublime Bill Hicks rant, and that was even before we knew that Sydney would be the last Olympiad in the pre September 11 era.

As the Taliban turned on the West, little did they know that they would indirectly cause every subsequent Olympics to be held in some kind of ridiculous policed states, where one cannot even break wind in public without being surrounded by a pack of Special Forces Narco-beagles.

I imagine admission to Heineken House now requires a strip search, a gold medal or a direct bloodline to Dutch royalty. Back in 2000, all it took was some blonde braids and a pair of clogs, which funnily enough was what I happened to be wearing at the time.

I was shifted from my anti-Olympic stance by Sydney and I get the strange feeling it is about to happen again. It seems as though the London Games is already in great form and it hasn’t even officially started yet.

I can’t quite come to grips with why I have this anticipatory smile on my face so crooked, the teeth are poking through like five overlapping rings of various primary colours.

Maybe it was that cheeky bugger at Olympics HQ who was responsible for putting the football national team videos together who decided to stir the Pyongyang pot.

Or perhaps it was the press, clearly bored to death by the calm before the storm, who got Australia talking by suggesting that Leisel’s got more rolls on display than Yo Sushi.

It could even be the fact that the People’s Republic of China has been ousted in a government backed doping scandal just a day after I littered my Olympic tipping comp sheet with random Chinese athletes (in which the rules stipulate that no changes are made to points awarded after retroactive medal stripping).

But either was I am in to the bitter end, even though the pummelling we get from Team GB could just be one of Ashes proportions.

Even the ever fiesty Craig Bellamy looks set to do his bit to add to the festivities, having already received a yellow card for mouthing off to the referee in tonight’s Team GB game against Senegal (a draw, for the record).

This next two weeks is sure to be full of surprises, it might just be like discovering the Pom’s ‘warm beer’ ain’t that bad after all.

So raise your ales to some quality Olympic competition, and let’s marvel at those riders who are trying to get their horses to moonwalk, applaud those divers who make a minimal amount of splash and wait nervously as we find out who gets the gold for being the world’s biggest BMX bandit. Giddy Up (yes, that is an Equestrian reference).