The Olympics have become a celebration of human frailty

Embracing one’s vulnerability seems to have replaced the higher, faster, stronger ethos of the Olympics. The very frailty that makes us human appears to have triumphed over the need to excel, or so the Games sponsors tell us. Not that I watched any of it. Not a single second, so help me you-know-who.

I liked Sebastian Coe’s remark in last week’s Speccie about taking advice from Djokovic, who quit the mixed, thus leaving his partner in the lurch. I’ve always liked and admired Coe and always mistrusted the Serb, but then I’m a small-timer where sport is concerned. One thing I’ve never done is quit, however, and I did compete at a high level in tennis, karate, even polo. Judo came later on, and I remember, when I won the world championship in Brussels 2008 in the category for 70-year-olds and over, my coach told me just before the final: ‘You’re a bum and fighting another bum. So if you lose, find your own way home — I don’t want to have anything to do with you.’ Talk about putting pressure on the poor little Greek boy. But it worked, and to us old-timers it’s called tough love.

Spartan mothers said something similar to their sons when they went off to war: ‘I tan I epi tas,’ which means ‘With this shield, or upon it.’ These days, American female pundits would probably demand jail for such mothers, cowardice and solipsism having replaced courage and self-sacrifice. The Olympics as a universal idea is now a crock; the Games have fallen from grace on account of their corruption (only Fifa is worse) and their commerciality. Seventy-three per cent of the Games’s revenue comes from broadcasting, and television is the priority.