A Sporting World

So now the Olympics are finally over and everyone's gone home...some to Parades and more medal presentations...will their necks ache after wearing those medals all the way from the airport across town and straight into another presentation? Athletes are maybe $750 000 richer for playing a sport they were bought over to play in the first place....and the story goes on.
So whats with the Olympics these days...it was only 2000 years ago that all you ever got was a laurel wreath around your head and maybe free food for a lifetime...or something like that. One wonders if the local discus maker would sponsor an athlete for a million drachmas to advertise his product!! Sporting was kinda pure...way back then. Then again, women and non Greeks weren't allowed to compete...so maybe it wasn't so great..they were missing out there.

So flash forward 2000 years .... gold medal winners are the most marketable people on Earth suddenly advertising watches they never wear, food they never eat and possibly clothes they wouldn't be caught dead in. And all this so that the general everyday ne'er do well with no concept of his own identity can parade around saying "Hey Michael Phelps wears Nike...so do I...so gee, I could be a rough caricature of Michael Phelps!!"

So now we've even stopped depending on our own athletes to win medals for the countries they're born to...okay maybe that's not so bad if you migrate to a country for the sole purpose of migrating to that country. If you're specifically brought over and given citizenship so that you can compete and win a medal for that adopted country, doesn't that smack somewhat of desperation? So now we have Brazilians playing beach volleyball for Georgia, Chinese table tennis players in Canada, Australia and Singapore, Jamaicans in Canada etc etc. Maybe we should stop making the Olympics about countries competing against each other. Maybe we should go back to the old days of jousting where the contenders walked in with their own personal coat of arms? Maybe that will silence the idiocy of countries claiming that they 'won' the Olympics because they won more medals than anyone else or because they won more Gold medals than anyone else or because they won more team events than anyone else.

What happened to the good old joy of competing for the sake of competing? For the pleasure of running down a track for the sheer enjoyment of it. Maybe for some athletes that's all it is. I hope it is! There must be some hope for the world!