Just who is being naive?

By PETER CALDER

The Olympic motto, Citius, Altius, Fortius (which means, for the benefit of those who dozed during Latin classes, "faster, higher, stronger") was dreamed up in the days when the modern Olympics felt a powerful link with their ancestor.

Athletes sweated in a single arena, running, jumping and throwing things like the discus.

These were activities which the ancient Greeks and Romans would have had no trouble following _ assuming of course that their chariot driver didn't get lost on the way to the venue. Nowadays they need to update that motto to include a whole lot of comparatives which probably can't be found in any Latin dictionary.

What's Latin for spunkier, for example (which we would need for the beach volleyballers)? Or for "more flamboyant" or "more temperamental" (the soccer players)? Or "more rugged" (the white-water canoeists)?

The Olympics are home now to 32 sports (37 if you consider, say, rhythmic and artistic gymnastics as two disciplines).

And when broadcasters are delivering global audiences of 3.8 billion you can be sure that the pressure to expand the pool of sports will be coming not just from the players themselves but from the commercial enterprises that see a sure return on investment in it.

Like it or not, the first Games of the new millennium are the most commercialised in history and the International Olympic Committee and Sydney organising body Socog don't seem to know whether they feel good or bad about it.

The IOC's first vice-president, Dick Pound, says that without sponsorship and commercialism the Olympics would be "a large, sophisticated and finely tuned engine developed over a period of 100 years - with no fuel."

But in a fact sheet put out before the Games started, the IOC was at pains to point out that the Olympic Games are among the least commercial of major sporting events - no advertising at venues or on athletes' clothing, free-to-air broadcasting and no uncontrolled commercial activity.

Control is big business here and big business is in control.

Just ask the folks at the Aussie Grill, a concession in Olympic Park which sells things like spit-roasted joeys (just kidding) and bacon and egg damper.

Or did. Damper is a bush bread cooked in a camp oven. But when the Aussie Grill started serving "bacon and egg damper" McDonald's, the official restaurant of the Games (it has seven outlets in Olympic Park) lodged a complaint with Socog.

Before you could say "would you like fries with that?" there was a strip of tape across a part of Aussie Grill's menu board.

The idea of a fair go is, if anything, more deeply embedded in the Australian psyche than in the New Zealand one and I haven't found an Australian yet who has had anything printable to say about this.

It would be foolish, not to mention naive, to expect that major sponsors would not want to protect their investments in the Games by stopping their opponents using advertising which links them to the Games, and several acts of Parliament as well as a host of regulations and agreements enshrine their rights in law.

As for those ad-free athletes, take a close look at the footage of Aussie super-swimmer Ian Thorpe picking up his gold medal for the 4x100m relay.

The golden boy is sponsored by an athletics shoemaker and as he came into shot on a billion television sets he was not quite quick enough artfully draping the Australian flag over his shoulder so as to obscure his logo.

Who's being naive now, Mr Pound?