A severe case of Olympiasphyxiation

August 27, 2004 - 12:16AM

The Games have run their race with Eleanor Limprecht.

I have had enough. I am seriously considering getting rid of my television, cancelling my newspaper and magazine subscriptions and moving somewhere far far away, like the Byron Bay hinterlands.

I've got a severe case of Olympiasphyxiation - Olympics coverage overload. Everywhere I turn I'm confronted by some uber-fit, super-bronzed athlete with gleaming white teeth holding up a chunk of metal on a ribbon and mumbling some incoherent thanks to mum and dad for endowing them with such freakish athletic ability.

On the flip side, I have to watch the sob story of a teary-eyed hopeful whose dreams were dashed by a slacker team-mate/accidental ingestion of equine growth hormone/encounter with a banana peel.

Call me un-Australian, but I don't see why anyone but an athlete's blood relatives would get up at 3am to watch the competitions. I'm even less likely to want to watch it 18 hours later when some mixing editor has put the events to a Celine Dion album. I'd rather watch a Friends rerun than another ex-gymnast commentator gush over the floor routine of a 16-year-old prepubescent girl who weighs less than my head and is wearing a sparkly leotard.

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Has no other worthwhile news happened in the past 10 days? What kind of catastrophe does it take to get the Olympics off the front page?

I asked my sister, who lives in the United States, if she had been inundated with Olympics coverage as well. "No, unless you look in the sport pages or specific TV channels it doesn't really rate," she said. "Why should it, what with the upcoming election, the Florida hurricane, the prisoner abuse scandal and everything else that's going on."

Now, I do realise that we don't have anyone quite as idiotic as Dubya to make national news, but there are plenty of eager political contenders.

I'm not saying get rid of Olympics coverage altogether, just remember what it is: a sporting contest. I don't need an hourly update of how many gold medals Australia has won, how much the athletes enjoy going out and partying in Athens, and exactly what kind of food they're being fed in the official Olympic cafeterias.

I don't want to hear the sordid details of the petty disagreements Team Australia is having or read the gossip columnists' predictions of which buffed athlete is sleeping with whom. And I'm glad Jana Pittman's knee feels better, but I don't need a daily update on its progress.

Least of all do I need to watch the kind of fluff that's been on the ABC's Lateline, where they sent a TV camera to the pub to film punters watching the Olympics and get their comments on what was happening. If I want to hear what the bloke at the pub has to say about Joe Athlete, I'll head down to my local and ask him, thank you very much. At least there I could have a few schooners to make his commentary sound better. And he'd probably be a lot easier on the ears than Celine Dion.
