I have covered six Olympics and I won’t lie: Mostly, they are equal — at least — to the hype. Mostly, over the course of 16 days in either biting cold or searing heat, they live up to wha🎐t we want them to be because the games, truly, are rarely an issue.
But the Games, almost always, are.
Rio de Janeiro is discovering that now, and Friday’s official banishment of the Russian track-and-fiel🍌d team is merely the latest — though certainly not the last — gale-fo🦋rce hurricane that will wreak havoc with its Games long before any of the games can even take place.
Friday’s announcement is merely the Captain Renault from “Casablanca” moment of the day — “I’m shocked — SHOCKED! — to find that doping is going on here!” — and may well be mere prelude, for swimming authoritiꦬes are pondering an investigation of Russia’s swimmers, too.
Rio had enough problems without worrying about hosting an invasion of the world’s athletes — a slumping economy, terrible government corruption, large spikesཧ in both unemployment and crime — but the Olympics have only exacerbated the problem, and each week brings fresh waves of intrigue, including sluggish advance ticket sales and facility construct𒉰ion rumored to be lagging well behind.
Then, of course, there is the Zika virus.
(Full disclosure: I will not be covering the Rio Olympics, the first Summer Games I’ll miss since 1996 and Atlanta. Normally, that would be a profound disappointment. But summer mosquitoes taunt and terrify me at Jones Beach and the Jersey Shore. I’m not unhappy to spare myself an encounter with A. aegypti and A. albopictus.)
Now, every one of those six Olympics I’ve attended were rife with worry beforehand. At𓆏 Sydney in 2000, the prevailing story was the long mistreatment of Aboriginals. Salt Lake City in 2002 occurred less than five months after the attacks of Sept. 11, and by Athens in 2004 there were serious anti-America sentiments evident throughout Greece.
And 2008 brought the Games to China, where the list of concerns was longer than th𝓡e Great Wall itself.
It’s wise to remember that there was a loud faction of New Yorkers that badly wanted to bring the 2012 Games to our city. That was a notion I always felt was preposterous, and I wrote that, and when the Olympics were awarded instead to London, those of us who’d lobbied against the Gotham Games w𝓡ere labeled in some precincts as sporting seditionists.
I’m not much into I-told-you-so’s but . . .
How would you like to be Rio right now (as Chicago very nearly was), challenging every ounce of infrastructure at a time when security is the No. 1 priority on the minds of all proper-thinking human beings? How would you like to be on🌸 the hook for building world-class, state-of-the-art sites for such sports as archery, fencing, cycling and more that will serve a two-week purpose?
Maybe the mosquitoes would have spared us, but something else would have arisen, the dep💯th and wor﷽ry of those possibilities as flexible as an imagination.
And, yes: Now we have the banishment of Russia’s track-and-field team, whose federation has 4,027 athletes, and while it’s been a while since we inhabited the pulpy-paranoid world of “The Americans,” the notion of an Olympics 🔴without 🌸the old Bear is almost unfathomable. And remember: That’s only this week’s plot twist.
There’ll be one next week. And th൲e week after. There are 48 days between now and the Opening Ceremonies at Maracana Stadium; how many of thosܫe do you suspect will be migraine-free?
Ending the Olympics is silly, and it’s folly. Too many athletes devote too many years, and too many countries still believe hosting a Games offers a Golden Ticket even ♚Willy Wonka couldn’t match. That’s fine. Let them go. Let them go on. As long as it’s in someone else’s back yard.
As long as t🤪he Olympics stay the hell off our lawn.