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Ah well, the summer Olympics has been launched with a huge open ceremony as always with modern Olympics with well-trained athletes just bursting to prove that they’re the world’s best and to set new world records. I have to admit, I’m not overly enthusiastic about this year’s Olympics, not at all.

It might be that I’m a bit superstitious, but I’ve had a bad feeling about this Olympics for a long time, and when I heard the news that the Olympic flame went out just a few days ago I became even more “nervous”. I have a feeling that something bad will happen during these games. What it is, I don’t know but it will be something. One thing that it will be remembered for, is the number of participants that will be proven to have used anabolic steroids.

Another thing is the amount of firepower and security these games have, which I can perfectly understand in these days of modern terrorism. But many of the images I’ve seen published on the net in the last few weeks are very disturbing.

Right in the middle of urban areas, we now see mounted firepower in such masses that it easily could be enough to settle a small war. The amount of money spent on both military arsenal and other security forces, plus the added amount spent on the games themselves (stadiums, advertisement etc) is enormous!

I don’t know, but I just get the feeling that this money could have been spent otherwise. The way I see it, the last few Olympics have all been about who could build the best and largest stadiums, much like an “I got a bigger penis than you have”-competition.

This is not what the Olympics are about, it’s about bringing a diversity of people together to enjoy each other’s company and to compete on equal grounds. I think this is all overclouded by the commercialism of modern games, the use of illegal drugs and the massive military presence.

Let’s just hope that the future proves me wrong and that the Greeks have a great event that will be remembered for what it was, a great sporting event, not just a theatre for the masses to prove the commercial value of what the modern games have turned out to be.

By Jostein Elvaker Haande

"A free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular" - Adlai Stevenson

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