KEY POINTS:
It's a curious thing how the Olympic Games nearly always manage to turn into a parody of themselves.
Like Beijing 2008. Don't get me wrong, I love the Olympics. The only-once-every-four-years, best-versus-the-best and gold medal syndrome is spellbinding and that classical competition is among the very highest moments
of sport.
But Beijing is being hijacked - by Tibet. There is no question who is winning the PR war; the mighty Chinese are being humbled by the Dalai Lama's assault PR troops; pictures of proud Tibetan protest and ugly Chinese repressers rocket around the internet and on TV news.
In New Zealand, various scribes have woken up to the Tibet-China dilemma - even though the issue has been around for about 50 years and been ignored totally by many of these same writers. It has only become an issue because it is Olympic year and the Tibetans have seized their chance cleverly.
China want the Olympics to be a showcase of their advancing nationhood but that's already backfired. Planeloads of Western journalists are ready to descend to confirm the evil deeds of the regime.
Some in the media have thundered on about how our athletes must drink deeply from the well of New Zealand's proud history of protest and free thinking and make more of China's dubious international relations and even more dubious human rights record. And they have a point.
But that's the great downside of the Olympics - pure sport has an awful lot of soapbox shinola to break through. Think back - to the 1976 Montreal Olympics and the boycott by the African nations aimed at New Zealand's support of South Africa's apartheid regime. The 1980 boycott of the Soviet Olympics in Moscow was motivated by the Western world making a political point.
Since then, we have seen the growth of the corporate dollar loosening the grip of the five Olympic rings; that proud symbol of all that is supposed to be pure and glorious in sport. Think 1984 and the Los Angeles Olympics where the Americans proudly re-labelled the pool the 'McDonald's Pool' as a new era of commercialism tugged at the five rings even more.
You can go even further back to find the first political manipulation - 1936, to be precise, when that Hitler bloke tried to use the Olympics to shine a light on his Aryan nation.
That exercise in prolonged and boring grandeur - the torch relay - didn't stem from the Corinthian ideals of ancient Greece; bloody old Adolf invented it for the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
Today it's an ever-growing event involving thousands of people, unconsciously aping the PR instincts of the Nazis as each host bids to outdo the last in a relay of greater complexity and window-dressing, showing off their country as the next resting place for Olympic ideals.
It's a crock, as is much of the non-sport, window-dressing of the Olympics; things like opening and closing ceremonies. Mightily impressive was the one opening ceremony I have attended, at LA in 1984. At one stage, out of the entire side of the LA Coliseum, dozens of pianists suddenly appeared, each on a little balcony which shot out of the side of the stadium - black guys in white tuxes, playing white baby grands and white guys in black tuxes, playing black baby grands. All symbolic, beautifully engineered, timed and executed - a triumph of the American art of staging a classy event.
I clapped enthusiastically along with everyone else - until I looked up to see how US President Ronald Reagan (whose most famous movie co-starred a chimp) was greeting this and saw Ronnie behind the bulletproof glass.
It was a watershed moment. Olympic ideals in the land of the free - but they still couldn't guarantee some loony wouldn't shoot the Prez. Particularly with that many bad movies under his belt.
The Olympics have often been politically hijacked just as surely as China has been by Tibet.
There is nothing wrong with this - one of the points made here is that political/corporate manipulation of the world's premier sporting event is pretty much de rigeur these days. This column also mounted a one-man crusade (pretty much ignored by everybody) for New Zealand not to send our cricket team to Robert Mugabe's odious regime in Zimbabwe a couple of years ago.
If we didn't want nasty old China to host the Olympics, where were the protests when the International Olympic Committee gave it them? Why wait until 2008 to have a moan?
Our politicians could lead the way - but wait... There's this landmark free trade agreement between China and New Zealand hanging in the balance. This means China could probably drop nuclear weapons on gay whales driving electric cars and could cut the top off Mt Everest to make a trans-continental highway and the most our government would likely say would be: "Tax cuts, anyone?"
No, the dollar rules in the Olympics as much as it does anywhere else. Expecting our athletes to fight the good fight is not only passing the buck, it's like asking the horses to ride the cowboys.
If we genuinely want to punish China for Tibet, Darfur and other issues, we need to do it as a nation - not neatly slip off the noose of responsibility by passing it round the necks of our athletes.
