Olympian heights are hard to come by

LockerRoom: Don't like to pull the old poor mouth but the sportswriter's lot is not a happy one. It's a lonely, harrowing business and it is rarely that the Stygian darkness in which we toil is cracked by a little ray of sunlight. Expenses day and the odd letter.

Nothing else. Sometimes a few simple words can mean a lot. Somebody wrote to me recently with a very moving message of encouragement, a shared thought which I will always treasure.

"You've written some shit columns recently," said my correspondent tenderly, "but today's was worth waiting for."

Some people wouldn't have been quite so moved but I was flattered by the writer's notion that there is actually some sort of brain (kitted out with a critical faculty) working behind these columns. There isn't. These columns are just what those monkeys would write on their typewriters in the eternity before one of them randomly keyed in Hamlet. Of course that's easy for me to say. I don't have to buy the paper. If I did perhaps I'd expect more from myself.

Take this morning. Actually had an idea. A little Gay-bashing. In July, the IOC will gather in low-grade accommodation in Singapore and award the 2012 Olympics to the citizens of some poor city. Those suckers will be saddled with massive debt for the rest of their taxpaying lives. Gay Mitchell thinks this would be a fine thing for us poor Dubs to get in on. So, every now and then, like a Punch 'n' Judy show, Gay and myself hit each other over the head for a week or so. He gets the publicity. I get the exercise and the easy columns.

This morning I was going to hit him over the head twice. First because of the plight of those poor Athenians for whom the old saying about being wary of Greeks bearing gifts is beginning to wear a little threadbare. The gift they gave to the world last summer is going to take longer to pay for than your Christmas credit card bill. The gift cost €9 billion, or twice what it said on the price tag when they agreed to buy it.

Who would have guessed that the Greeks' happiest sporting memory of 2004 would be a soccer tournament in Portugal? Then I was going to take the report of the world-leading credit analysts Standard and Poorer (which, coincidentally is the title of my next collection of columns) into the business of hosting the 2012 Olympics, I was going to take the report and roll it up and hit Gay over the head with it repeatedly until his quiff cried out for mercy.

The crack team of Standard & Poor's analysts (The Incredibles of the finance world) examined the finances of the five cities bidding for the 2012 Olympics. Good news for the megalopolis cities New York, Paris and London who would risk, say The Incredibles, little damage to their credit ratings. Madrid and Moscow would face some financial problems which could involve making most of the population redundant.

The report, alluringly titled, The Cost of Olympic Gold: the Credit Effect of Hosting the 2012 Olympics, bases its findings on the official bid book for each city. These are detailed plans of how much each city expects to spend on the Games, and what it needs. The cities must also state how they plan to raise the revenue.

Now lie down on a hospital trolley before you consider the following capital budgets, to be spent on facilities and transportation upgrades. Lowest of the contenders is the €1.26 billion by Madrid, highest is €12.1 billion by London. Right in the middle is New York with €5.8 billion. (The other figures are Moscow €7.7 million and Paris €4.75 billion). In a special note for Bertie Ahern and anybody else still hankering after Abbotstown, the report points out that Sydney (whose Homebush Olympic site was the model for Abbotstown) now spends €26.1 million a year to keep open the facilities in what is effectively a sporting ghost town.

I was going to write all that and then sit back chuckling to myself (not so shit now, eh?) when I came upon the Kenyans and their poignant Olympic bid.

Jacques Rogge was in Kenya last week. Rogge is a nice, urbane man but his presence in Kenya seemed to cruelly highlight the inadequacies of the Olympic dream. When Rogge travels he does so as essentially the CEO of a large corporation. His knees don't get bruised in economy class. In his hotel bedroom they turn down the sheets and leave a nice mint on the plump, fresh pillow.

In Kenya, Rogge walked into the heartland of a nation which has given the Olympics so much and gained so little in return. We still celebrate (justly) that four-minute mile of Roger Bannister's but how many of us know the name of the Kenyan who ran sub four-minute miles one after another in a two-mile race in Belgium in the 1990s. Daniel Komen. Whatever level we brought running to the Kenyans, they brought it to a different dimension after their first appearance in Melbourne in 1956.

At the reception to mark Rogge's arrival Komen came in a large Japanese car. Others, less fortunate, walked or were not there at all. Pioneers like Kiprono Maritim, who ran in Melbourne in the first wave of Kenyan athletes post-independence, shuffled in uninvited, unrecognised. Poverty stalks him.

Amos Biwott, the fabulously unorthodox steeplechaser from 1968, was there too, as were Ben Kogo, who finished second to him, and contemporaries Kip Rono and Mike Boit. They were poor men then and they are poor men now.

At least they are home. Richard Chelimo, who came second (for a while he had gold until Khalid Shah was reinstated) in the hugely controversial 10,000 metres final in Barcelona, died of a brain tumour in Eldoret, the capital of Kenyan running having been wracked by alcoholism and depression.

John Ngugi, a five-time world cross-country champion, copped a three-year ban for refusing to take a drug test. With that he fell through the cracks.

And Henry Rono. He works now at Albuquerque Airport. In the end, for a man who used to carry $100,000 around with him in a briefcase in case he needed to buy drinks for friends, the only thing which beat the alcoholism was the poverty. He fell so low he couldn't afford to drink.

Those are just some of the big names, men who brought sweet lustre to the Games through a time of disillusion. Kenya has 2000 professional athletes strung out across the globe, making a crust here, being exploited by an agent there, drowning elsewhere.

Plucked from the Rift Valley at young ages and hungry for cash they aren't equipped for either failure or success.

And in the middle of all this, while Rogge was absorbing the disparity between the lifestyles of the stars of the Games and some of the figures mentioned in the bid documents above, Ochillo Ayacko, the Kenyan Sports Minister, announced Kenya's intention to "marshal resources" for a bid to host the 2016 Olympics. Kenya is 13 times poorer than Greece, even after Greece absorbs the size of its Olympic debt.

The old heroes of Eldoret stood gape-mouthed and hungry. Ayacko burbled on. Rogge, embarrassed but empathetic, recognised the indigenous pride of a battered nation.

Hopefully he thought to himself that when the IOC gets around to looking after the well-being of some of the people who made the Olympics a four-star spectacle and a five-star sponsorship opportunity, perhaps then it would be time to get back to Mr Ayacko for a quiet chat.

There again, the Olympics, like this column, just seems to roll along without thought or planning and every four years something worth celebrating happens.

Or not.