Theodore Dalrymple: The Sporting Lie

Theodore Dalrymple writes:

But the Olympic Games repelled me from the first, with their nasty political overtones both childish and sinister, their obvious cheating (did anyone really believe that Tamara and Irina Press were women like any other?), their bogus amateurism, and their deformation of human lives dedicated, for example, to putting the shot an inch farther than it had ever been put before. A life down the coal mines seemed to me far better spent than that.

Since then, my attitude has only hardened against sport, and now I feel a visceral dislike of it.