THE NAKED CITY – THE OLYMPICS – CAN WE PLEASE HAVE THE BILL?
The Olympics are over for another four years and no doubt the endless post-mortems are about to follow. Compared to more recent Olympics, like London and Beijing, you have to admit Rio had it all – Russian drug cheats banned, submerged sofas on the kayak course, athletes and tourists mugged, street protests, high level ticket scalping and corruption and controversy over intersex athletes.
It was a media feast par excellence and no doubt will continue to be so for weeks to come. The Sydney Morning Herald recently estimated the cost to the Australian taxpayer per gold medal of around $11 million and you might well say, thank god we didn’t win any more! Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way and we wonder whether we will ever see a detailed bill for the four year cost of getting our supersized team to Rio and back.
Critics of the big bucks in Government subsidising of our athletes are usually countered with the argument of “look what their success does for our national pride”, translating into increased economic confidence and greater overall prosperity. The latter might well be correct as we look back at the financial legacy of our own Sydney Olympics. The winner might have been Sydney, but the real winners were the landlords and real estate vendors who jacked up prices post Olympics as Sydney asserted itself as a ‘truly international city’.
So what now for the next four years as we lick our wounds for Rio and prepare, no doubt, for another bumper team for Tokyo in 2020. The millions splurged getting to Brazil will soon be forgotten, the naysayers silenced and our national fervour rekindled as we strive for what the ABC’s legendary Norman May once celebrated as “Gold, Gold Gold!”. There’s even a suggestion that a city like Brisbane may well put in a bid for the Olympics in the decades to come. Silly Brisbane!
We might be enthusiastic about repeating the whole Olympic experience in 2020, but will an increasingly troubled and fractured world match that keenness? Not to mention the rampant disillusion that comes with endless doping scandals and countries such as Russia stooping even so low as to dope up their Paralympians.
And then of course there’s the contentious issue of what so called sports should be added to the Olympic schedule, given the IOC’s continual desire to appeal to a younger generation and introduce new and funky competitions like BMX and skateboarding. Here’s where Australia could really come to the fore as we push for some of our unique ‘pastimes’ to be included as Olympic sports.
A Darwin style beer can regatta could certainly be added to the rather boring sailing events, emphasising the need for global recycling and a call to real ingenuity in design. Aussies love a good belly flop into the backyard pool and an Olympic style ‘beer belly’ flop, 200kg and over, would be an instant ratings success. We also love those inflatable Sumo suits and you can’t tell us they wouldn’t brighten up the otherwise unfathomable Greco Roman wrestling.
There’s lots of things we are uniquely good in doing and we should certainly make our case known. Hey, Aussies love to dump trash, in all sorts of ‘secret’ places like pristine bushland and the bottom of rivers. A submerged sofa comp, in which teams of athletes attempt to drag down as many sofas as they can into some murky waterhole, would be a real test of endurance and a suitable homage to the kayak course at the Rio.
