My Rant

So much for the triumph of the human spirit. Sixteen full days of second-rate, semi-pro athletes swimming and running, shooting and jumping, riding and all-too-occasionally falling.

Now that the Olympic circus has left town, can we get back on with the business of hating each other in harmony? “One world, one dream,” they say. I say quit pretending and focus on the real game: World Domination.

The sleeping giant has awoken, the Chinese century has begun. We’ll reserve our right to criticise your human rights record and jump on the pro-Tibet bandwagon when the (digitally altered) fireworks are over, thankyouverymuch.

Speaking of media manipulation, did you hear the one about GetUp!, the online activist group who paid top dollar for a series of “Free Tibet” advertisements scheduled for the opening ceremony?

What’s that? You didn’t see them? Lucky we don’t have media censorship in Australia, we’d end up like the poor old Chinese.

I digress.

I have all the respect in the world for the dedication and the athleticism our Olympians exhibit. I admire anyone who pursues anything to such a level of excellence.

But really. Heroes? Inspirational, yes. Venerable, certainly. All the same, I don’t remember seeing Stephanie Rice or any of her cronies pulling children from burning buildings in the last two weeks. No kittens rescued from trees either.

To complain of the elevated status we afford our sportsmen and women at the expense of the arts and research funding is beyond banal. But like all clichés, there is a kernel of truth beneath the schmaltz.

Our film industry is truly that of a banana republic, despite giving rise to some of the best talent at work in the industry, both behind and in front of the lens. Our pioneering work in developing photovoltaic cells is increasingly taken up in California and China but not in the Sunshine (Smart?) State. Talk about fiddling while Rome burns.

As has become custom, we nurture our talent until they’re just ripe for the picking, and then watch the dust fly as they head for exile in Hollywood, or Silicon Valley or Geneva or London. The pastures are greener, the paycheques fatter, the recognition more forthcoming.

But our sporting stars are spared this fate; the nurturing is there. Boy, is it there. After the intensive, expensive training at our institute of sport, we repay them not only with our unfaltering adulation, but with lucrative endorsements and perma-tan television careers. It seems that Tall Poppy Syndrome, that most infamous Australian condition, has finally found its equal.

Yet looking even slightly beneath the veneer of heroism shows that our demi-god sports stars, much like the rest of us, have a few chinks in that brilliant armour.

Warnie. Ben Cousins. Wayne Carey. Nick D’Arcy. Greg Bird!

Granted, we should try and separate the off-field antics from what happens in the game, and remove ourselves from the entrenched “footballer/cricketer as role model” claptrap. But with great privilege comes great responsibility – if you live in the public eye and profit from your notoriety, you had better be prepared to suck it up when the name and shame brigade come a-knocking.

If anything, the above examples of less than sportsmanlike behaviour ought to be more reason for scorn than a resolve that places one in the upper echelons of their chosen field. Time and again though, we see such thuggery shrugged off as boys being boys and the game goes on. Meanwhile, the PhD candidate who is saving an indigenous language from extinction is doing the nightshift at 7/11.

I’ll admit it, for every Greg Bird there’s a Glenn McGrath; for every indiscretion, a charitable foundation. I’d just like to see less mindless glorification of sport and an acknowledgement that just like sport, art, culture and knowledge matter.

Some folks might even consider them heroic.