The real losers from London 2012

The Olympics are done and dusted. The Aussies, in particular the much-vaunted swimming team, fell well short of expectations.

The Australian Olympic Committee’s pre-Games 15-gold predication was wildly optimistic.

It hasn’t taken long for the ‘experts’ to begin dissecting our Olympic performance, with everyone in the know pointing the finger at the federal government for a lack of funding in high-performance sports.

It seems as though it’s the taxpayers fault for Michael Diamond’s Greg Norman impersonation. Supposedly we should all reach deep into our pockets for more of our hard-earned cash to ensure Matthew Mitcham makes the final in Rio!

Personally, I don’t like ragging on athletes who don the green and gold – unless of course it’s cricket, football or union.

Bitching about (mostly) amateur athletes who put their lives on hold to represent Australia is like taking a leak in the shower. It might feel really good at the time, but there’s something about standing in a pool of your own urine that’s morally wrong.

So instead of putting the knife deeper into James “Misfire” Magnussen and Steve “Yips” Hooker, I thought I’d take a look at the real losers from London 2012.

1. Commonwealth Bank Australia

Rather than dropping their interest rates to support struggling families in these tough economic times, the wise heads at CBA decided to plow millions into their ‘CAN’ advertising campaign.

For two weeks we had to watch as our mortgage repayments were thrown in our face while an annoying group of lifelike letters talked up our athletes’ chances, especially the aforementioned Magnussen.

Spare a thought for the head of marketing at CommBank, who the day after our Weapons of Mass Destruction self destructed in the four x 100 men’s relay, had to call a team meeting. Here’s how that meeting allegedly played out:

Marketing head: “Jeez we really missed the mark with the whole CAN thing. Did you see that relay this morning? What a total screw up.”
Assistant: “Yeah, what a total screw up!”
Marketing head: “We need to do something quick to fix this.”
Assistant: “Yeah, we need to fix this quick.”
Marketing head: “How about we keep the ‘T’?”

2. Swisse

This campaign was so successful it had my four-year old humming the tune to “ain’t no stopping me” while reluctantly brushing his teeth each night.

After the first week, when he realised that despite his enthusiastic cheering the Aussies weren’t winning any gold medals, he quickly went back to the ‘Go Diego Go’ theme song. It’s also good to know that the best source of vitamin C might be an orange instead of an orange-coloured tablet.

Tired? Stressed? You’ll win silver on Swisse.

3. The Australian sports-loving public

I know we all (quite rightly) had a bitch and moan about Channel 9’s seizure inducing coverage: we’re at the pool, now over to gymnastics, now equestrian, back to the pool. But at least we had some semblance of constant sport on the box 24/7, even if it was accompanied by Karl Stefanovic’s head.

Now that the Olympics are over all we have to look forward to is Lara Bingle visiting the Big Brother house in The Shire to dance off against a desperate farmer who is looking to get laid.

Please shoot me now… but not you, Michael Diamond!