Kevin Myers: Why are the Special Olympics so misnamed? Merely because athletes have a disability of some kind or other does not in any way merit the term "Olympian" for what they do.
Quite simply, their competitions do not in any way resemble the Olympics; for they are entirely honest, untainted by drugs and uncompromised by any kind of political chicanery.
Possibly some of them will be on drugs, but only those required to keep them healthy. Not for them the pathetic excuse that they tested positive for anabolic steroids because they took a cold cure remedy or a vitamin supplement. None of them have been adding musculature to their frames by illegal substances. Every woman will be a woman, and not some new, intermediate species with ovaries she can scratch and shoulders like a work-bench. No indeed: unlike many "Olympians", all our visitors next month will be honest athletes.
Not that all "true" Olympian athletes are cheats: middle- and long-distance runners seem less prone to the dishonesty endemic in the rapid-energy use events. But now that we've learned that even Carl Lewis failed a drugs test in 1988, and that this was hushed up by US officials to ensure he could compete in the Seoul Olympics, we may reasonably wonder when was the last honest short-distance runner, or jumper, or weight-lifter, of either sex.
We know Flo-Jo was a cheat, and her women's world records are both meaningless and probably unmatchable, except perhaps by a she-cheetah on "E". She could have entered men-only showers with no questions asked. She got her gold medals and is now dead: all meaningless. RIP Flo-Jo.
The charlatans and expense-account wallahs of the IOC have presided over the effective destruction of the term "Olympian spirit". We can be sure that virtually every major sprinter competing in the Olympics is at the pinnacle of a colossal pharmacological effort, involving a cocktail of drugs to increase musculature and enhance performance, and a macédoine of other drugs to conceal the chemical traces of the first lot.
Indeed, it's probably time for the IOC to introduce a special series of events for pharmacologists, using old people's corpses as test-beds for the drugs. And next in the pole-vault is Myrtle Entwhistle (1919-2002), and look at the old girl go, aided by the largerbolics steroids of competitor Karl-Heinz Rumplestiltskin, formerly chemical coach to the East German team in the 1980s.
Though we should be delighted for the Special Olympics athletes, it would not be true to say that I will watch the games avidly. I won't. The purpose of the Special Olympics is not to give spectators pleasure so much as to give it to athletes who have had to overcome huge disadvantages in life, far greater than the rest of us could ever imagine. This justifies a prosperous State such as ours showing a great deal of generosity towards them.
So what was even more depressing and disappointing than the decision of the Government to follow the lamentable example of Clonmel councillors and - effectively - withdraw the invitation to athletes of SARS-affected countries was the absence of any national outcry about it. Yet it's probably illegal, because the countries themselves are not quarantined, and there's free movement back and forth between them all and the rest of the world. The only restriction, it seems, is upon the mentally handicapped.
This is disgusting and indefensible, both morally and as a health precaution, because it's not as if thousands of fans will be following the teams. All the people coming to Ireland can be easily quarantined before they leave their native countries and monitored once they get here. The only requirement is organisation, discipline, and steadiness of nerve: three qualities, it seems, that we apparently do not believe we possess.
SARS remains a minor epidemic. It is difficult to transmit. It is highly localised in its spread. And to ban every athlete from China is both degrading and hysterical. China has a population of about 1.25 billion people. It has a land-mass of 3.7 million square miles, about the same size as the continent of Europe, from the Caucasus to Norway and Spain. Would we ban an athlete from Oslo because in Sevastopol, someone was sneezing?
Is there a touch of racism here? If you're slanty-
eyed, are you more likely to be a source of the yellow peril, and more likely to be subject to an exclusion order? And if there had been an outbreak of SARS in Seattle, would the government have introduced a blanket ban on all athletes from the US?
But it's the relative popular silence about the ban which is even more depressing. It suggests that piety without principle is a prevailing national characteristic: being seen to behave well, like the daily communicant of old, is far more important rather than actually behaving well according to exacting and difficult standards.
Unprincipled piety caused people to oppose war against Saddam, but without proposing an alternative method of ending tyranny in Iraq. Unprincipled piety means that we embrace the peace process, but do not insist on enforcing its central rules about disarmament and disbandment.
Unprincipled piety means that we revel in the warm glow of being seen to care for those less fortunate than ourselves; but when it comes to taking hard decisions which might involve some effort by us, we duck them, and take refuge in blanket bans and weasel words.
The Government ban on these unfortunates, so far ahead of the games, should have been a source of national shame: and the popular silence which has followed suggests unprincipled piety is once again at its gruesome labours.