Squalor upon squalor, dirt upon dirt, dishonesty upon dishonesty. You hope that each Olympic games will be the last, that someone will draw a starter's pistol, put a live round in the chamber, point it at the entire Olympian movement and shoot it dead.
It is irremediably corrupt; it is a vile, diseased organisation, and the sooner it is got rid of the better.
We know that there are beacons of honesty and athletic integrity in the Olympics - those miraculous runners from north and east Africa, and our own Sonia, and others like Paula Radcliffe, who makes up for her lack of physical attributes by having the heart and the stamina and the courage of a burly sisterhood of lionesses.
And it's not that they are a few towering exceptions, because most events are honestly run. But that is hardly the point. Who gives a damn who wins the middleweight archery or the clean-and-jerk embroidery competition? Who wants to see the coxless beach volley-ball or underwater dancing? For no event is too risible now to be rejected by the IOC. Pubic-waxing will no doubt soon become an Olympian sport, plus bee-keeping, and maybe a spot of formation gardening.
Events which have their own perfectly good competitions have been roped into the Olympics in complete and utter violation of the central Olympian rules - contests should be measures of human strength and speed: fastest, farthest, heaviest, highest.
But no such human absolutes apply in the cycling competitions, which are more about incredibly expensive technology than athletics. Needless to say, we see no speed-cyclists from Malawi. On the same principle, we could expect to see grand prix motoring in the Olympics.
Judgment sports have no place in any proper athletic competition, least of all when the athlete being assessed is a horse, which is essentially what happens in dressage. And since horses are allowed in for both eventing and show-jumping, why shouldn't the Derbys and grand nationals and gold cups be replicated in the Olympics? And how soon before greyhound and pigeon-racing enter the Olympics also? But we can't get away from the drugs. We know - we know that many, if not most, athletes who engage in sports which require muscle-building - sprinting, lifting, jumping or throwing - use illegal drugs. What we don't know is the degree to which the cheats are successful in using masking agents which conceal the traces left by anabolic steroids and related substances.
The old Corinthian spirit, which involves the majority of a country's athletes, is just about dead across the world, except perhaps in one country. This one. I could be wrong, but I can think of no other country in which the primary sporting codes are both unassailably indigenous and unassailably amateur. And the GAA codes are both.
You can imagine Ireland just about without everything, but you can't imagine it without the GAA. For years, the GAA lived in terror of "foreign" codes, and imposed its wretched, reactionary ban, which merely reflected its own insecurity towards things English. Yet the abolition of the ban has made the GAA an even more successful organisation, both financially and athletically in both main codes (I must confess to a certain lamentable ignorance on the subject of handball).
The simple truth is that most GAA football matches are superior to most soccer and rugby matches as spectator sports; hence their vast crowds, while club rugby plays before what could pass for a bus queue, and even Leinster's early European matches draw the size of crowd you'd catch in the urinal at half-time in Newbridge. As for club soccer, you'd get more spectators choosing to view an operation on Michael Winner's haemorrhoids, in which the commentator's happy shout - what a pile-driver! - really does apply.
And this before we come to hurling, the greatest field-sport in the world, which this season has produced more great matches than Maguire & Patterson, causing sportswriters to reach for Japanese, Russian and Bantu dictionaries, the verbal resources of the English language having been long since exhausted.
It's not just the richness of the sporting scene which makes the GAA central to Irish life, for it gives enormous texture beyond the pitch: the loyalties of parish, barony, county and province are shaped around the success of GAA teams. And Irish identity is almost contingent upon lesser, regional identities which slot neatly together to form part of the greater whole. Yes, hard to believe though it is, some men stand on tiptoe, their pulses quickening, when they hear the name "Louth". And this spine of Irishness consists of thousands of people voluntarily spending hundreds of thousands of hours a year coaching young people and working for their local clubs, all because they love their sport, the good it does for their communities, and the good it does Ireland.
It is that sense of locale which gives GAA its very rootedness in Irish life. So it was a shocking denial of a defining feature of the GAA when Clones was deprived of the Ulster Final. This was wrong for Clones, wrong for the core principle of provinciality, and most of all, wrong for the GAA.
But enough of the GAA-knocking! I'm here to praise it! GAA for ever! A final point. Hollywood GAA club recently extracted €20 from me for its annual raffle. I take it I have now said enough to justify my winning the first prize on pure merit? The easiest way of arranging this is to make sure my ticket goes into the hat alone. Thank you, a cheque will do.