Could the Olympic Games become fair sport?

Other financial matters are stirring. Should taxpayers receive any return from our gold medallists who they helped pay for, and which has opened the door for enormous future personal incomes?

Gaining far more wealth than the athletes however, are commercial interests, including the IOC, which expects to make US$3 billion from the Beijing Games, and the now well dug-in vested interests of the sports institutes themselves.

Amotz Asa-el, writing for the Jerusalem Post, points out that while Nazi-Stalinist style political hijacking of the games has reduced, the games have become a financial circus. “What originally was intended to promote political tolerance, personal modesty and competitive honesty has been corrupted into an orgy of corporate greed and political intrigue.”

Yet the spectacle of the Games has brought happiness and excitement into millions of lives across the world. This unique peaceful meeting of nations has promises that could still be fulfilled. How?

Dennis Altman recognises that “the Olympics have become a display of global consumerism and national triumphalism, but it is unrealistic to expect otherwise”, and foresees that if governments’ expenditure reduces, corporations will take over sponsorships. Must we give up on fairness so easily?

Could the Games be made fairer by similarity of equipment? By medal tables that included the outlays spent to acquire them?

Could these sports gatherings return closer to their idealistic origins by including the poetry and theatre of the old Olympiads?

Could they return closer to their original value which was encouraging the skills required by their times? The hunter-warrior skills needed by the ancient Greeks are less needed today. We might replace as events some of the more recent odd novelties - synchronised diving, beach bikini ball-games? - by skills that are more needed in the modern world that could also be breathtaking spectacles on global televisions.

In some sports, the Third World might for once have an advantage - pedalling to replace electricity for communications; weightlifting people, as needed in hospitals; freighting water on your head; and as one writer has suggested, house-crafts, those most maligned and ill-considered essential exercises that could become glorified with prospects of gold medals. There is already an “olympics” for trade-skills that can be expanded, and hyped up with more publicity.

Imagine, millions everywhere preparing for a fair Olympics using skills that are needed everyday.