Olympics: They really are a weird mob here

While tennis players and doped-up Chinese athletes were falling by the Olympic wayside this week, a remarkable story surrounding the brilliant Australian triathletes was concluding.

Rather than finding a way out of the Olympics, which seems to be the in thing at the moment, former world champion Emma Carney was still fighting tooth and nail to get selected.

The dispute has threatened to rain on Australia's opening day parade on Saturday next week.

The Australians have many superb women triathletes, and the race is on day one, so we may get an early taste of that wonderful experience of listening to Advance Australia Fair.

There's a chance that by the end of the Games, de-programming courses will be needed to rid the mind of our neighbour's national anthem.

But at least Carney has had the decency to try to stick a spoke in her country's wheel and spare us an early rendition.

The dispute has gone on for four months as Carney sought to overturn the selections of Nicole Hackett and Loretta Harrop, a fairly bold little effort from Emma given that they are the current and last year's world champions.

(The third member of the squad is veteran 31-year-old Michellie Jones who, you guessed it, is yet another ex-world champion).

The dispute has caused Harrop to shed tears in training, and cost tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and lost commercial opportunities.

Go Emma. That's the Olympic spirit - try to get a couple of world champions tossed out of your own team.

At least Graeme Miller and Cycling New Zealand had the decency to get their dispute over the road cyclist's non-selection settled in a reasonable amount of time.

Carney's effort ended up in front of three senior lawyers at the Court of Arbitration for Sport and was only resolved this week, with Carney losing out.

Which would have given her a fair deal of heartache, given that her publicly stated motto in life is "second place is first loser."

There is, however, a serious message for New Zealand's sports administrators.

Get the selection criteria right because athletes are increasingly prepared to challenge when they miss out.

For a start, there are huge amounts of money on the line for them.

However, the Olympics do not seem to have the sort of attraction to tennis players as they do for Emma Carney.

The decision by 1996 gold medallist Andre Agassi not to compete is yet another blow to the relevance of the sport at the Olympics.

More than a dozen of the top 40 men's and women's players will skip the event.

Agassi had strong personal reasons.

His mother and sister are battling cancer.

But without wanting to belittle that personal tragedy, things like "family commitments" seem to pop up more readily with tennis players when the Olympics are involved, than say before Wimbledon or the United States Open.

To pinch a tennis term, a lot of them don't seem to give a toss about the Olympics, which is pretty much the way a lot of people feel about tennis at the Olympics.

Everything is so carefully controlled in the commercially orientated Olympic world they even try to tell photographers what brand of battery to use in cameras.

But one thing Olympic organisers can't control is the whims of superstar tennis players like maybe the best player of all time, Pete Sampras, who won't be in Sydney.

There will, of course, be interest in whether old man Dokic starts spinning out about the price of fish at the Olympics - which he would be perfectly entitled to do given some of the food prices - and so publicly humiliating his daughter, Jelena, as he has just done at the US Open, where he was thrown out.

But the Olympic movement's courting of tennis superstars is a dud.

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