London 2012 - May the Best Athlete Win!

The first week of the Olympics in Australia has been extraordinary. On the first day an Australian women's relay team won a gold medal and the media and the nation were jubilant. Then we saw the long slow decline of so many aspects of our modern society, in all it's ugliness, when no more gold came our way.

Australia's medal bellyflop!

Disaster, fail, poor sports, embittered competitors, media dissection, endless excuses and questioning of coaches, of funding, or the athlete's character. And all this while nine incredibly gifted young athletes from our country won silver medals and four more won bronze, not to mention a high number who made finals and then just missed being on the medal dais by the narrowest of margins. As well as those who looked so humbled by simply being in that first heat of their event and wearing a tag that made them an official Olympian, a tag they could keep for the rest of their life.

Eric the Eel - Sydney 2000 Olympics.

I'm sure everyone is proud of all of them, even those belittling their performance, but why do commentators need to voice personal opinions, during events, about the lack of an athlete's work ethic, or that the performance of the team is somehow less than it has been in the past. They are dissecting the funding received and looking at Australian coaches being lured away to train other athletes from other countries as reasons for not winning gold. No-one has yet suggested an athlete didn't win gold because they didn't have the natural ability to match that of the winner or the other athletes ahead of them.

Australia is a country of 24 million people. In some Olympic competitions we have punched well above our weight. Very rarely if ever, that I can remember, have we fallen below. This year we are about were statistics would place us if one of those geeky maths guys ran the Olympics and took all factors of wealth, opportunity and populations sizes into consideration and then assigned medals from his calculator. That's an Olympics I certainly wouldn't care about, at least, on my statistics, I would be 71.483 percent recurring less likely to care about it.

Australian Olympics Medal Tally

2008 - 14 gold, 15 silver, 17 bronze - 46 medals

2004 - 17 gold, 16 silver, 16 bronze - 49 medals

2000 - 16 gold, 25 silver, 17 bronze - 58 medals

1996 -    9 gold,  9 silver, 23 bronze - 41 medals

1992 -    7 gold,  9 silver,  11 bronze - 27 medals

1988 -    3 gold,  6 silver,    5 bronze - 14 medals

Maybe, just maybe, the Olympics have some lessons for us. Extraordinary lessons, astounding ideas that have never been thought of by anyone before in human history:

Winning isn't everything. Anon.

I want to be able to say: I gave it all I could, I gave it my best. Anon.

Don't judge those who try and fail, judge those who fail to try. Anon.

If you are not big enough to lose, you are not big enough to win - Walter Ruether.

 People succeed when they realise their failures are the preparation for success. Emerson

It seems I am wrong - many people have thought these same things, many times before - so why is the media acting like a top floor executive and only caring about the bottom line?

Once again it's because the news has become entertainment. It's big business to attract viewers and keep them watching. They do this with proven formulas of emotional back stories that tug at our hear strings and by creating controversy. Then they elevate the personality of correspondents they own and these correspondents allow themselves to be swept up in the world of celebrity, forgetting what it means to be a journalist and a reporter.

I have some favourite Australian reporters across many fields. These are people I trust and admire. When it comes to sport Australia is blessed, but all too often you can see the drift of a great journalistic mind being slowly chipped away and perverted as to what their role is by aligning themselves with a network who own them and push them towards being the story as opposed to reporting on it.

I'd like to see them all keep their conjecture to themselves and report on what is in front of the. If a person is at the Olympics they've already won. If they win a medal they're extraordinary. If they don't, it doesn't reflect badly on anyone and needs no excuses or derision from anyone.

Olympic Fever - The Parochial Games

Last night I watched a breaststroke swimming heat and was swept up in the commentator's fervent narrative. He was concentrating on an Australian making up ground. I thought the Australian had won at race's end, but alas no, he came third. There were two in front of him. The caller eventually gave me those names, but it was the third place getter that we cared about, it was the Australian in the race that mattered.

I have to admit to being a sports purest. I follow a football team with a healthy dose of two eyed reality. I know when they are playing well and when they're not and when they're not I don't try and fool myself that they are any chance at season's end. But I love sport and only my football team leads me to be bias about hopes and results in the face of facts.

I love watching so many sports provided they're played well and to a high level. If they are I get an emotional high as the final result is reached. But the Olympics comes once every four years and for me the games bring out the best in human kind. The absolute purity of a competitor trying to gain a place on the top tier of the dias and claim the title as the very best in the world is something unmatched in most of life.

The Olympics are the culmination of four years of unbelievable hard work for a competitor that can all be undone in a second of lapsed concentration or missed form. That's why the Olympics are so special. That's why they are so exhilarating and so cruel. 

I want to see an American win. I want to see a Chinese competitor win. The lowly represented countries lucky enough to have one world class athlete, whether that athlete is only good enough to qualify or win, is the story of triumph, of ability over financial support and opportunity that I want to see. That's not to take anything away from those who win from the privileged countries who have the facilities and finance to support the dedicated, it just adds to the drama that sometimes even the best trained, best funded and best coached can sometimes be placed behind an athlete with nothing more going for them than pure natural talent.

That's why I look forward to the Olympics and enjoy them as a special two weeks. I enjoy knowing the stories of all the athletes. I want to hear of the journey taken by the winner and for a moment enjoy their triumph. I certainly don't want a magnificent moment ruined by on overenthusiastic commentator who only has eyes for my own country's athletes. I don't want to hear the reasons why our sports people didn't win, while the extraordinary story of the winner's journey and ultimate triumph is ignored.

Pure unbiased sport will win every time. Save the parochial coverage for the moments that deserve it and let us enjoy the moments where other countries get to enjoy theirs.