It may come as a surprise to you that I love the Olympics. You’ve probably seen my past posts, phlegming on and on about how sport is a dead spider in the early morning mouth of humanity. You probably even think that I lied in the first sentence of this blogpost in a shameless, pathetic way to get your attention in any way possible.
And, of course, as you quite tediously always are, you’d be absolutely right. I straight-up loathe the Olympics. It’s got to the point where if someone starts to even say the word Olympics, I have an instant Pavlovian response and bury them up to the eyes in rage-infected stinging nettles. This also makes collateral damage of people talking about olive oil, so I hope Seb Coe’s happy.
Now, let’s face it, there’s no shortage of reasons to hate the Olympics. From its mindless nationalism to its astonishing sexism, from its brain-bulleting brand protection rackets to its essentially falsified promises of economic rejuvenation, it’s a stupendous example of unabated godawfulness – and always has been in its modern form.
However, it’s none of those reasons that I’m going to discuss today, although they’re all equally (by which I mean considerably more) worthy tributaries that should flow into anybody’s hate-river. Today we’re looking at the indescribable uselessness of the games.
Now, if you were going to spend £9 billion (and counting) on a project, you would expect it to either be something that was worthwhile one-off (in which case it would need to be seriously worth the outlay) or something which kept bubbling out goodness across a number of years. That is to say, it needs to be a single event worth £9bn, or it needs to be something that delivers some return on the investment, whether financially or for the good of humanity.
The Olympics, of course, is neither. Let’s take the latter first. The Olympics falls into a much-hyped ‘Summer of Events’ in Britain, where Euro 2012, Wimbledon and the O-bomb itself all smashed into each other, creating a bloody horrible messy wreck, like coaches all carrying nuns, puppies and the last vestiges of human decency smashing into a fatal pile-up on the M1, except far more tragic.
And with the other two events, what happened? There was a brief beery fervour as England tried and failed to do the only thing that they’re tremendously overpaid to do, and then the day after we were sent out of the running, half the country completely forgot about the tournament completely, followed shortly by the second half when whoever it was who actually won the bloody thing, had done so. Was it Lithuania? It was probably Lithuania.
The same goes with the Wimbledon. In a fictional survey of 40,000 people, only two and a half humans could actually name a single winner in any of the tennis matches, although most of them could remember the embarrassing moment when a Scottish simpleton shouldered his way into the arena and confusedly cried for an hour.
So it will be with the Olympics. Scientists have actually coined the Olympicosecond, which is the amount of time that passes between a sports event ending and 99% of the population continuing to give a single, lonely fuck about it. By the 13th August, we’ll have entirely forgotten the vast majority of the events and the names of the winners and the losers. Unfortunately, by the time the next Olympics are announced, we’ll have also forgotten all the shameful scandals surrounding them, allowing ourselves to be tickled into fervour anew by the masturbatory hype they self-propagate.
Make no mistake, hype is all it is. If we were to remove the hype from the Olympics, the following would happen: sponsors would drop out faster than a speeding javelin, it would be off the television in a snap and all that would be left would be a few underdressed dunces jogging confusedly around a local park, winking at non-existent cameras.
As for the Olympics being a single one-off event worth £9 billion, I think we all know the money would have been better spent if we’d thrown 1,800,000,000,000 five pound notes into a furnace that powered a gigantic robot to comprehensively stamp all over London’s road and businesses.
The real wang in the custard is that nobody in the entire stretch of two weeks is going to do anything to further the course of humanity. People splutter on like old taps about how the Olympics pushes forward human endurance, and it’s a celebration of humanity, but that’s total rubbish. The arts and science genuinely stretch our boundaries and change humanity forever – the Olympics may result in a person running a millisecond faster around a course than has been done in that specific setting before. We won’t discover so much as a new way to make rice pudding from this. People will say yay and then be bored until someone else does it another millisecond faster.
We’re asked to consider Olympic athletes as heroes and told that we should celebrate them, but functionally they do no more than the man setting a Guinness world record for how far he can walk backwards with a glass of spoiled milk balanced on his stupid nose, or a woman wearing more pairs of socks than anyone else has ever worn. The only actual difference is that one type of activity we’re told to revere, and the other we’re taught to revile. Olympians may spend their whole lives practising to try and run a short distance slightly faster than everyone else who has spent their whole lives practising to try and run a short distance, but this is a cause for tragedy, and possibly counselling, not celebration.
So it’s far from being a worthwhile one-off event, it’s the ultimate exercise in pointlessness, roughly on a level with building a small market town to be inhabited only by dead leaves and glossy photographs of Pat Sharpe.
Overall, I hope everyone enjoys the two weeks of nonsense, traffic jams and general shouting. But don’t forget afterwards to ask yourself: was this really worth the £143, 700 it’s costing per person in the UK? Because I’d rather have had a robot chauffeur. I’d already picked out a name. It was going to be Mankles.
And, of course, as you quite tediously always are, you’d be absolutely right. I straight-up loathe the Olympics. It’s got to the point where if someone starts to even say the word Olympics, I have an instant Pavlovian response and bury them up to the eyes in rage-infected stinging nettles. This also makes collateral damage of people talking about olive oil, so I hope Seb Coe’s happy.
Now, let’s face it, there’s no shortage of reasons to hate the Olympics. From its mindless nationalism to its astonishing sexism, from its brain-bulleting brand protection rackets to its essentially falsified promises of economic rejuvenation, it’s a stupendous example of unabated godawfulness – and always has been in its modern form.
However, it’s none of those reasons that I’m going to discuss today, although they’re all equally (by which I mean considerably more) worthy tributaries that should flow into anybody’s hate-river. Today we’re looking at the indescribable uselessness of the games.
Now, if you were going to spend £9 billion (and counting) on a project, you would expect it to either be something that was worthwhile one-off (in which case it would need to be seriously worth the outlay) or something which kept bubbling out goodness across a number of years. That is to say, it needs to be a single event worth £9bn, or it needs to be something that delivers some return on the investment, whether financially or for the good of humanity.
The Olympics, of course, is neither. Let’s take the latter first. The Olympics falls into a much-hyped ‘Summer of Events’ in Britain, where Euro 2012, Wimbledon and the O-bomb itself all smashed into each other, creating a bloody horrible messy wreck, like coaches all carrying nuns, puppies and the last vestiges of human decency smashing into a fatal pile-up on the M1, except far more tragic.
And with the other two events, what happened? There was a brief beery fervour as England tried and failed to do the only thing that they’re tremendously overpaid to do, and then the day after we were sent out of the running, half the country completely forgot about the tournament completely, followed shortly by the second half when whoever it was who actually won the bloody thing, had done so. Was it Lithuania? It was probably Lithuania.
The same goes with the Wimbledon. In a fictional survey of 40,000 people, only two and a half humans could actually name a single winner in any of the tennis matches, although most of them could remember the embarrassing moment when a Scottish simpleton shouldered his way into the arena and confusedly cried for an hour.
So it will be with the Olympics. Scientists have actually coined the Olympicosecond, which is the amount of time that passes between a sports event ending and 99% of the population continuing to give a single, lonely fuck about it. By the 13th August, we’ll have entirely forgotten the vast majority of the events and the names of the winners and the losers. Unfortunately, by the time the next Olympics are announced, we’ll have also forgotten all the shameful scandals surrounding them, allowing ourselves to be tickled into fervour anew by the masturbatory hype they self-propagate.
Make no mistake, hype is all it is. If we were to remove the hype from the Olympics, the following would happen: sponsors would drop out faster than a speeding javelin, it would be off the television in a snap and all that would be left would be a few underdressed dunces jogging confusedly around a local park, winking at non-existent cameras.
As for the Olympics being a single one-off event worth £9 billion, I think we all know the money would have been better spent if we’d thrown 1,800,000,000,000 five pound notes into a furnace that powered a gigantic robot to comprehensively stamp all over London’s road and businesses.
The real wang in the custard is that nobody in the entire stretch of two weeks is going to do anything to further the course of humanity. People splutter on like old taps about how the Olympics pushes forward human endurance, and it’s a celebration of humanity, but that’s total rubbish. The arts and science genuinely stretch our boundaries and change humanity forever – the Olympics may result in a person running a millisecond faster around a course than has been done in that specific setting before. We won’t discover so much as a new way to make rice pudding from this. People will say yay and then be bored until someone else does it another millisecond faster.
We’re asked to consider Olympic athletes as heroes and told that we should celebrate them, but functionally they do no more than the man setting a Guinness world record for how far he can walk backwards with a glass of spoiled milk balanced on his stupid nose, or a woman wearing more pairs of socks than anyone else has ever worn. The only actual difference is that one type of activity we’re told to revere, and the other we’re taught to revile. Olympians may spend their whole lives practising to try and run a short distance slightly faster than everyone else who has spent their whole lives practising to try and run a short distance, but this is a cause for tragedy, and possibly counselling, not celebration.
So it’s far from being a worthwhile one-off event, it’s the ultimate exercise in pointlessness, roughly on a level with building a small market town to be inhabited only by dead leaves and glossy photographs of Pat Sharpe.
Overall, I hope everyone enjoys the two weeks of nonsense, traffic jams and general shouting. But don’t forget afterwards to ask yourself: was this really worth the £143, 700 it’s costing per person in the UK? Because I’d rather have had a robot chauffeur. I’d already picked out a name. It was going to be Mankles.
