Paris

With the opening ceremony being held today, I have a lot of thoughts on the Olympics.  The main one being I probably won’t watch much of it.  And I’m not just talking about the opening ceremony (which I probably won’t watch at all), but the Olympics as a whole.  And the American TV coverage can take a lot of the blame for that – with its bloated and jingoistic coverage.  It’s a shame, because I do like checking out the cornucopia of ridiculous and stupid sports every 4 years that otherwise I couldn’t give a monkeys about.  Though I could hark on forever about which sports should and which sports shouldn’t be in the Olympics.  Similarly for which sports have too many medals (swimming), which sports are too reliant on subjective judging (any “trick-based” events), which sports are particularly boring (sailing, synchronized diving).  I could dwell on the very dodgy politics and shady finances of the games.  Or who in addition to Russia is conducting state-sponsored dosing (I’m looking at you Chinese swim team).  I read somewhere that Team GB is expected to get 50 to 70 medals – which seems an awful lot, but then we have done inexplicably well at the last few Olympics and it’s not like we have to worry about Russia and Russian athletes in many of the sports this time around.  But don’t expect me to be rabidly cheering on the British athletes – I don’t care enough.  It’s telling how very fleeting the winners’ moment of fame is e.g. how many of the 22 Team GB gold medalists in the last Olympics could you name?