Don’t know about you but I watch the Olympics in the first way Ian Johnson describes things here. Ian, on the other hand, has a rather different view …:
You can follow the Olympics two ways. First, there’s the right way: you pay attention to the athletes and root for great performances. You see them cry and hug each other in joy or look away in disgust at a bad performance. You empathize with them as human beings and debate issues like whether Michael Phelps is the greatest Olympian of all time or just the greatest swimmer. You wonder about doping but try to believe that the sports agencies have it more or less under control and that Dick Pound is just another Canadian curmudgeon.
Then there’s the way I watch the games: as a statistical survey of geopolitics and destructive public policy …
Read the rest : The New Olympic Arms Race by Ian Johnson | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books.