THE NAKED CITY – THE GRUMPY GUIDE TO THE OLYMPICS
With less than a hundred days to the start of the Olympic Games in Brazil, it’s fair to say that interest is not even at the bronze medal level. It’s often said from the Australian perspective that the last great Olympics, steeped in the amateur spirit, were the 1956 games in Melbourne. Sure there was blood in the water at the infamous Russian versus Hungary water polo game, but compared to recent years there was an innocence that defied controversy.
On the surface Sydney 2000 was also a raging success, although it marked the beginning of an escalating real estate boom as we fast established ourselves as one of the world’s most expensive cities. In the ensuing years world sport in general has been dogged by almost daily scandals of administrative corruption, drug taking and rampant commercialisation. Australia was recently named in WADA’s top ten list of doping offenders along with the perennial “good sports”, Russia and China.
So what of the upcoming games in Brazil, a country currently embroiled in not only major political turmoil but rapid economic decline, massive crime figures and the dreaded Zika virus? It’s highly unlikely Brazil’s current leader President Dilma Rousse will be joining other world figures on the opening ceremony rostrum as she faces likely impeachment and removal from office.
We have all heard stories about Brazil’s race to finish the Olympic infrastructure and the drastic cost cutting that has even seen TV sets scrapped from rooms in the athletes’ village. Given the country’s current economic malaise, you have to wonder how they were seduced or bludgeoned into hosting the games in the first place, especially so soon after staging the World Cup in 2014.
Who knows what goes on in the hallowed halls and shady corridors of the IOC, but surely it’s time to reinvent the whole Olympic concept. One suggestion that sometimes crops up is that the Games return to its spiritual home of Greece on a permanent basis, with countries worldwide contributing to a perpetual infrastructure. Some events could even be run in the nude, evoking the tradition of the ancient Olympics circa the fifth century BC. If the unlikely ‘sport’ of golf is to become an Olympic regular, why not insist that it is played entirely in the bollocky, spectators included?
A naked Olympics would certainly boost television ratings and discourage the commercial intrusion of corporate moguls like Nike, with nowhere to display their normally omnipresent logos. Whilst nudity might be a challenge for Stalinist North Korea, that’s one country we’d nominate as a potential host for a future Olympics. Surely the portly Kim Jong-un would not knock back the propaganda value of Pyongyang staging the event in the 150,000 capacity of the The Rungrado 1st of May Stadium, currently the world’s largest.
When it comes to mass displays of flipping those coloured cards nobody does it better than the North Koreans, and what a spectacular opening ceremony it would be, complete with a procession of tanks, ground to air missiles and giant inflatable statues of Kim himself. Berlin 1936 all over again with a modern day Hitler, but here’s the catch – once the country had opened its doors to a massive influx of international athletes, TV crews, sports drug dealers and tourists, the average North Korean would soon realise that democracy was a helluva lot more fun. The regime would crumble, history would repeat itself and Kim would drop a cyanide pill in his fortified underground bunker.
The moral of the story being that if any country is chosen or puts itself forward to host the next Olympics, it needs to be for the common good, and a good that embraces the world at large – not just for shameless self-aggrandisement. Laugh if you like, but in a few decades from now we could well see naked golfers teeing off in Pyongyang with an even more portly Kim Jong-un urging Olympians to emulate the achievement of the late Kim Jong il who once carded an amazing 38-under-par round of 34 including eleven holes in one – albeit fully clothed.
