The Olympics will once again be hugely popular – because we cannot bear too much reality

Last month, the chief executive of NBC Universal, Steve Burke, looked forward to the Rio Olympics. The games, he said, were on course to be “the most profitable Olympics in history”.

Another NBC executive Seth Winter told the LA Times that the station’s ad revenue was already at $1.2 billion dollars which was in excess of their take from London four years ago.

In 2011, NBC paid $4.32 billion to the International Olympic Committee for the US rights to the Olympics from 2014 to 2020. In 2014, they agreed a new deal to pay $7.65 billion from 2021 to 2032.

"If you think between today and when London took place — television audiences are down 30%," Burke told the LA Times.

"There is a good chance that Rio ratings will be around the same as London, maybe higher. For an advertiser that wants to change perceptions over a 17-day period, there is only one of these, so it becomes increasingly valuable.”

Broadcasters are so sure of their audiences for the next fortnight that rivals adjust their schedules accordingly. Netflix, for example, expect that the Olympics will slow subscriber additions in this quarter.

NBC have never made a profit from the Olympics, but they have never been more hopeful that they can make a profit.

Last year, Discovery, owner of Eurosport, paid £920 million for the pan-European rights to the Olympics. “There is no more unique property anywhere on the globe. It’s live, it’s must have, it has universal appeal from male to female,” Discovery’s chief executive David Zaslav said at the time.

The build-up to the Olympics has been overshadowed by the scandal of Russia’s doping, the failure of the IOC to ban the country from the Games in Rio and the desperate treatment of Russian whistleblower Yulia Stepanova. 

Last week, it was also revealed that Lizzie Armitstead, the UK cyclist, would compete at the Olympics, after she won an appeal against a provisional ban for missing three out-of-competition doping tests in a 12-month period. On Thursday, Michael O’Reilly became the first Irish Olympian to fail a test before the Games. The same day it was confirmed that 271 Russians from the original team of 380 had been cleared to compete.

Maybe if these events had been public when NBC and Discovery were negotiating with the IOC the TV companies would have paid less as they would have been aware that the Olympics are tainted by the failure to exclude Russia and the inability to protect Stepanova.

Or perhaps the TV companies would have taken another gamble and decided that the public didn’t care.

Apart from doping, there are other things the general public don't really care about. They don’t let the information that the IOC executive committee receive per diems of $900 while on IOC duty, (regular IOC members get by on $450) affect their viewing pleasure.

They seem unconcerned by the demands of the business model which brings the Games to Rio and asks so much of hosts that finding future venues may be a problem, unless you have someone like Vladimir Putin in charge who will spend $51 billion on the Games as he did for Sochi in 2014.

The protests in Rio about the ludicrous expense and corruption will only make an impression on the general public if the events themselves are affected.

With professional boxers, golfers, basketball players and footballers among those in Rio, the Olympics may not look like the Games pictured by Pierre de Coubertin, but there are plenty of athletes who will achieve a lifetime goal and who have sacrificed everything to make it to Brazil.

Their sacrifices will sometimes become part of the emotionally overwrought story that are part of the buildup to individual events. Some of these athletes with tales of compelling sacrifice may also be doping, but it’s highly unlikely we’ll ever find out about that.

If we do, then they will be recast as the central figure in another archetypal Olympic story: the athlete who crossed the line, the competitor who risked it all and lost sight of what the Olympics are all about by cheating in their ruthlessly selfish pursuit of glory.

In this context, it's understandable if some wonder if they can believe what they’re seeing, but they should put their minds at ease.

While some will suspend their disbelief, most people will simply enjoy what they watch over the next fortnight, viewing the Olympics as the TV companies want: dramatic events loosely based on a true story.

Maybe we can’t believe what we’re seeing, but we’ve never really been able to believe what we’re seeing once sport became a ruthless business where winning is the only thing that matters.

We can probably be sure of this: the athletes at the Olympics will be trying to win, some will have doped to do that, having decided either to cheat or to give themselves what they believe is a fair chance in a sport corrupted.

When Cathal Lombard tested positive in 2004, he explained his decision to dope in this way.

"I don't want doping in sport, but it has certainly reached epidemic proportions. My eyes were really opened from conversations I had with people on the professional scene," he said.

"I looked at some of the times being consistently run and I asked myself if this was possible naturally. The only logical conclusion I could reach was that, in a lot of cases, the answer was definitely ‘no'. I realise now that most of the people I'm speaking about on the professional scene are operating on a very sophisticated basis, with proper medical back-up and advice on how not to get caught. In comparison I was merely dabbling and made no attempt to cover it up.”

On Thursday, Richard McLaren, author of the July report into state-sponsored doping in Russia, told The Australian of his dismay at how things had unfolded.

“My reporting on the state-based system has turned into a pursuit of individual athletes,” he said.

“The focus has been completely lost and the discussion is not about the Russian labs and Sochi Olympic Games, which was under the direction of the IOC. But what is going on is a hunt for people supposed to be doping but that was never part of my work, although it is starting to (become) so.’’

For most people sport is now entertainment, so the pursuit of cheats must be part of that process. Those who are caught become useful idiots, prove that the tests are working for some and important characters in the drama for others.

There must be heroes and villains, a cartoon version of reality which is an extension of the tired idea that sports reveals character.

Sport is important, not necessarily because of what we learn about the people involved, but because of what it allows us to forget about ourselves.

We cannot bear too much reality, and modern sport is the solution, something understood by TV companies who have paid billions for the rights to sporting events.

So the public will escape over the next fortnight and that diversion will be thrilling and contentious, but always compelling.

If the public were more emotionally invested in the Games, if they looked upon athletes the way they viewed, say, football teams, maybe they would care more about the methods used to entertain and to win.

But when people care more they tend to become even more unaware of their moral compass as could be seen in some of the arguments made by supporters during the racist incidents involving Luis Suarez and John Terry. Doping - something it is easy to be much more ambivalent about than racism - will therefore always be easy to rationalise.

We could look at the reluctance to hold competitors from our own country to the same standards that are expected when a Russian or Chinese athlete is implicated as further evidence that when it comes to doping, as when it comes to many things, we are prepared to engage in moral posturing, but not much more.

To engage in any other way would be to encounter a reality too complicated to comprehend, a reality which would show that what we ask of sportspeople pushes them to the limits as we demand that they go faster, higher, stronger.

So Russia will be booed by those who can be sure that their own country’s competitors are clean, and the defeat of Justin Gatlin will become a priority for anyone who believes that the truth is always pure and simple.

In those moments, it will be easy to see why sports journalism sometimes is called the toy department. Some will engage in cheerleading which suggests they aren’t just employed in the toy department, they are the guy dressed as a clown working the bubble machine as you walk into the store.

This may be the year when the public tires of all this and decides that the Olympics, as some declare, is beyond redemption. But this is not about redemption, except in the corniest way.

The TV companies may be right to have made the bet that people don't care. The public may not have lost faith in the Olympics simply because they never really believed in the first place.