Olympic TV view: Arrests, cartels, inner bits – just another quiet day in studio

After Traumatic/Terrific Tuesday, it was a relief that Wednesday had so little Irishness in the Olympic diary, just a gentle first-round stroll on the golf course and a run with Ciara Everard in the 800 metres.

As a nation, we'd been through more the day before than the other 205 will experience throughout the entire Games, what with, well, Conned Conlan, Majestic Murphy and Brilliant Barr.

By most accounts, the tallest rollercoaster in the world is the Kingda Ka in New Jersey, but a trip on that would be in the ha’penny place next to what we had emotionally endured.

So, thank the heavens, an unremarkable day ahead.

"Should be a quiet afternoon, lads, a bit of golf and athletics, a chat with Sonia and Jerry, and we'll be home and hosed," Joanne Cantwell possibly said to the RTÉ team before they went on air.

And then . . .

“We did think it was going to be a quieter day,” she told us, ominously, “but events in Rio have taken quite a turn.”

All you could pray was that Conlan hadn’t found himself in a lift with his judges, so it was with some relief that it was only about the president of the Olympic Council of Ireland being arrested in Rio.

Phew.

RTÉ took cautious baby steps with the story, which was probably advisable, facts being on the slim side in the early stages, so we found ourselves watching golf and athletics heats when all we wanted to know was what was happening elsewhere.

CNN has been known to flick away from, say, a president announcing the US's latest war to show its viewers a car chase in, say, Happyland, Oklahoma, and you kind of wanted RTÉ to do something similar, hiring a helicopter to show us Philip Bromwell motoring around Rio from hotel to hospital to press conference to police station.

A while later, we had a choice between listening to Jerry Kiernan discuss a lady's inner bits, ahead of Caster Semenya's race – "She is intersex, which is sort of in between," he sensitively explained – or hopping over to RTÉ News Now to watch the daily briefing from International Olympics Committee (IOC) director of communications Mark Adams and Rio organising committee spokesman Mario Andrada. A tough choice, but the briefing it was.

Safe to say, Mark and Mario have had easier days. Corruption, dodgy judges and near-empty stadia were just some of the cheery topics they had to address, and even if they pick up that €800-a-day allowance that IOC executives are treated to in Brazil, by the time they limped out of the hall they possibly concluded it wasn’t half enough.

Back to RTÉ2, where, having spent the first half of their afternoon discussing testosterone, Jerry Kiernan and Sonia O'Sullivan now had to turn their attention to the business of facilitating ticket touting, the forming of cartels and illicit marketing. Nobody in RTÉ told them there'd be days like this.

Joanne gave us the latest from Rio and then asked Jerry if we should all be embarrassed. He was having none of it.

“Well, it hasn’t improved the gaiety of the nation,” he conceded, but 110 per cent no, he wasn’t embarrassed. “We’ve always known that the governance of sport in general is corrupt,” he said.

Joanne: "You can't say that!" (By now she was thinking the Prime Time gig would be a cruise. Sonia, meanwhile, looked like she'd be happier discussing ladies' internal bits.)

But Jerry carried on saying it, the gist being that it’d be surprising if we found any of this surprising. “I’m not embarrassed – and neither should we be as a nation. We haven’t invaded a country.”

That’s true. But we probably deserve a gold medal in the biggest headline-generating small nation in Rio category.

Just to try and cheer Jerry up, Joanne showed him a rerun of Thomas Barr's semi-final win and meeting with David Gillick in the mixed zone after. "Oh my God, whaaaat the hell," he laughed as he hugged Gillick, the smile on the fella as wide as you've ever seen.

“Now I’m proud to be Irish,” Jerry said. “No embarrassment.”