LOCKER ROOMONE OF the little perks that go with this gig - which I nailed down after several mildly degrading afternoons on the sports editor's creaky casting couch - is the opportunity every now and then to see the International Olympic Committee strutting in full plumage.
In any group photo of the IOC there are a few very sharp people peering gimlet-eyed at the lens. And there are many stuffed suits just puffed up with happiness at having their photo taken in the company of other well filled suits in an exotic location.
The best places to catch the gang all together are at the shindigs when the IOC choose a city willing to host some running and jumping, or a Quadrennial Celebration of the Games of the Olympiad.
When the moral-high-ground people outlawed the old tradition of the candidate cities creating mountain ranges of nice gifts for the IOC members to hike through they missed the point. The gifts had begun to cancel each other out, and anyway, there can be no bar put on flattery. There are no allowances or prohibitions which can put an end to the dangers of self-aggrandising.
When the IOC members gather in some five-star hotel to consider which of the supplicant cities shall be offered the Games and a lifetime of higher taxes for its citizenry, well, for those few days the IOC rules the world and instead of Rolex watches the candidate cities bring the gift of flattery.
In Singapore last time out, London beat Paris with a late run precisely because Tony Blair was willing to spend lots and lots of time posing alluringly on the casting couch in the lobby of Raffles Hotel. Jacques Chirac, strangely positive that the bid was in the bag, came over all dignified, dropped in for a quick bonjour and then left again. Blair, all greased and sexy on the couch, cleaned up.
It was old-style politics. Just what the IOC likes. If you are a political junkie there is no purer fix. For instance, the IOC was severely embarrassed back in Monte Carlo in 1993 when Sydney pipped Beijing for the right to host the Games of 2000. The Australians had done their homework and had then got the breaks in the voting process. The Sydney Games, as it happened, were an immense success, and though we look back on Marion Jones's Drive for Five with a faint sense of nausea Sydney offered the most successful and celebratory of recent Olympiads.
Everybody knew all along, however, that the IOC would deliver a Games to China sooner rather than later, and seven years ago in Moscow it was duly done. Every now and then the IOC likes to deal with a regime instead of a government. Generally the IOC likes to deal with the oligarchy of big companies who rule the world. So the IOC hopped into bed with the regime and so it came to pass that the massive corporations who sponsor the Games were given China on a plate and everybody respected each other in the morning.
Why not? A virgin market of a billion people! The world's next superpower! It had to be done. It was flattering just to be doing business with the Chinese, let alone to be offering them something the Chinese wanted and craved. A match made in IOC heaven.
And for the rest of us and our little moral qualms? There will, sadly, be no meaningful boycott of the Beijing Olympics even if the situation in Darfur worsens again or the Dalai Lama gets run over by a Chinese tank or the Kafkaesque trial of the human-rights activist Hu Jia ends in him having his tongue cut out on live television.
Get real. Last week Nike announced its third-quarter net profit was up 16 per cent on the previous year's figures. This jump was achieved in tough times for retailers domestically and was ascribed to Nike's robust growth in "emerging markets". Nike shares leapt in response to the good news. So did IOC hearts. The Olympics can still deliver.
The IOC, flattered by Beijing's attentions and always keen to please its array of sponsors, has given the Chinese government a huge bucket of whitewash to work with.
When you have great stadia and friendly hosts and computers in the media centre that work you are well on your way to making people feel it is almost impolite to ask the hosts about ticklish matters like human rights.
There is no great political advantage for anybody in boycotting Beijing. Honestly, when did you lot last wake up in a cold sweat about Darfur or Tibet? A market of a billion people is such a great, big, sweet nut to crack anyway, and sports people just see what they want to see. So the Games will go ahead.
Take as typical the view of John Furlong, the former Dublin footballer who masterminded Vancouver's bid for the Winter Games of 2010. John said the other day he felt the same concern "any other decent human being would share for anybody who's in harm's way, anybody who is suffering. But what I am saying is that the Olympic Games is not the place to solve this. Sport is the one thing we all have around the world that's good."
See! And John Furlong's view is not unique. An unwillingness to see how the Olympics confers legitimacy on the deeds of the host regime is a common trait among the happy-clappy "sport and politics should never mix" brigade. It is the view that will prevail over the next few months. We feel your pain but why harm "athletes" by denying them their chance to go lepping and racing in the smog? Surely the rights of athletes trump the rights of all others?
Announcing happily last week the Olympic torch relay would as planned go ahead - starting this morning and taking in a trek up and down Everest, no less - Jiang Xiaoyu, the executive vice president of the Beijing Organising Committee, noted wearily of Tibet, "These disturbances are totally against the spirit of the Olympic Games . They are a challenge to the Olympic Charter."
Jiang Xiaoyu knows his constituency. It takes 100 per cent delusion or 100 per cent cynicism to argue that protesting for human rights is an offence to the tattered old Olympic charter. Among those that might make the decision concerning a boycott there is an easy majority made up of pious delusionals and devout cynics.
The Games will go ahead and perhaps we bleeding-hearts types are the ones who should stop deluding ourselves. An effective idea floated out of somewhere last week, however - from Canada, I believe. Why not boycott the Opening Ceremony? The Olympics offer no purer stage for propaganda and po-faced agenda making than the opening-ceremony extravaganza.
Prezz Bush commented recently he regarded the Olympics as purely a sporting event. Dubya apparently has the intellect to divorce all the lepping and racing and drug cheating from the human-rights issues and the propaganda spin all around him.
We would expect no less of him - the leader of the free world - but we imagine there are people out there who will just tune in for the sweating and fist pumping and assume that all is okay with world.
There will be no lepping or racing at the opening ceremony, however, just a three- to four-hour shop window open for China to sell a sanitised and wholesome version of itself to the world. Imagine a few rows of empty seats in the VIP stand. Imagine key heads of state missing. Prince Charles, bless his little sticky-out ears, is already declining to attend. Imagine if it became an issue, if the media declined to cover the event and the press rows went empty on the night as well.
Imagine if the space normally devoted to covering the opening ceremony was devoted to explaining why exactly it wasn't being covered. Imagine if teams opted not to endorse the whole deal, declining to have their flag borne in ahead of their happy-clappy athletes. Better still if they asked the team to stay away. Not an athlete would be discommoded, not a digit in the profit-and-loss accounts would be threatened. If it is all about the sport, the sport would proceed as usual.
As the Dalai Lama himself might say, it's the middle way.
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