The Olympic spirit
With time on my hands and the decks clear for a fortnight, the 26th Olympiad was something I thought I must see. It took a bit of wrangling to get a seat but I am only 2.365 metres from all of the action (I measured it yesterday).
At my place, the best seat in the house is mine, and late at night I even get the coffee table all to myself. Never one for the sports pages, what I may have to say about anyone's prospects or prowess is commentary concocted a short time ago. Nonetheless, challenged to give voice to them I work extra hard to make them sound like my own. But I'm lying — I admit that now. My view of Atlanta is really Channel Seven's, I merely soak it up.
Thus situated, in ready sponging distance from the console, my mind is irrigated with the Olympic spirit. Sloshing around in me at dangerously high levels is a vast quantity of love for my fellow human beings. Regardless of their colour or creed, as long as they compete without performance enhancing substances (on that point I am allowed to be unforgiving) I am encouraged to take joy in every mother's son and daughter. You beautiful people, I loves ya all!
Golly, if the world could just stay like this we could surmount our many differences and begin to live as one. Wouldn't that be something. We could imagine (all the people, living in har-mon-ee) the way John Lennon urged us to. With IBM, Telstra and Optus bringing us closer together, today anyone anywhere can bite into a Big Mac and know they're part of the same meat-eating family of mutually respecting beings. Not even a minced dead mad cow could dampen the human spirit when offered such shared fare.
With all our past conflicts put aside, the spirit of Atlanta speaks to us not just because it is the temporary home of the Olympic flame but because Atlanta, Georgia, USA, is also the home of the world's favourite soft drink — Coca Cola. Take a few moments to take in the significance of that. Every time any one of us sucks on a Coke we will be imbibing in the spirit of Atlanta. And friends, guzzling on such a beverage is as good as it is going to get between Olympics.
Everywhere, around the world, except, I haste to add, in Cuba.
Those damned Cubans! Here we all are ready with lips pursed to suck on an iced cold Coke in the spirit of human fellowship and understanding when Fidel Castro and his cronies are saying that's not for them: no working for the yankee dollar in this country.
Don't they know Coca Cola won the Cold War?
So where can I buy a Coke in downtown Havana?
Maybe the spirit of the XXVI Olympiad does not — and from all accounts, should not — extend that far.
Dave Riley