Are the Olympic Games Still Relevant?

One of my favorite sporting event is the Olympic Games. I like both the winter and summer games even though most of the sports are foreign and sometimes strange to me. In a world of artifice, of phony reality TV, mindless phone apps and political correctness, watching live competition between the best in their field is refreshing. There is no affirmative action, no privilege, no favoritism (well, excluding the crooked judging in gymnastics) in the games. The Olympic Games are the world as it used to be in microcosm.

Who can't get excited by watching men's handball or rhythmic gymnastics? Opps! Bad example,. Still, if that is shown when I am watching the games I am somehow unable to pull myself away from the scenario where, for example, that Pakistani with one eye and a life in a Pakistani ghetto has the chance to defeat the British aristocrat in the bronze medal match.  It's illustrative that the games, for all their faults, are a last bastion of the old world values that I so miss in the trendy but empty world in which we live today.

I am not a sociologist, but my anecdotal evidence suggests that as technology advances, cultural values decline. Their seems to be an inverse relationship between the two, illustrated in the detachment so many humans have escaped to (clutching their cell phones in their refuge). Is not our community today not one, but rather a mass of individual enclaves in which the occupant creates his or her own separate world?

I wonder how long the Olympics can remain relevant in today's landscape. The Games are under attack from within (corruption of the Olympic committee, cheating scandals by teams and individual athletes, bribery to host) and without (apathy of the media and sporting spectators, manipulation of the games by TV and corporate sponsors, and the idea that such big event sporting contests are irrelevant today). Are the Olympic Games no longer relevant? Is the world in which a computer game app is more exciting than a real competition between the world's best the new reality? I hope not. Regardless, I'll watch that Indonesian sprinter compete in the 100 meters competition that he has no chance of winning because it's a better reality than is a life clinging to a cell phone reality.