The Olympic Games has run its course. Rather than being the embodiment of a spirit of global peace and unity, it has become nothing more than a showcase of minority sport wrapped around image and money-making. It's time to leave it to the athletes and invest those worthy attributes in a more deserving cause, such as the soccer World Cup.
Protests surrounding the torch relay have put paid to any suggestions that the Olympic spirit is alive and well. The demonstrators have come out in the name of China's poor human rights record, but they might just as well be telling the world that the event no longer stands for what the organisers claim it does.
This was inevitable. Politics, globalisation, technology and air travel that everyone can afford have melded to make the Olympic concept redundant.
The idea made good sense in the 19th century, when the founder of the modern Olympics, French nobleman Pierre de Coubertin, determined that they were the ideal way to rid the world of war. France at the time was smarting from its defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1871. Better to bring nations together on the sports field rather than the battleground and, in doing so, foster peace, he believed.
In the days when telephones were few, air travel non-existent and nations jealously guarded what they had, this seemed sensible. Wars were not prevented, but at least enemy nations came face to face.
But the facade began to crumble with the politicisation of the Games, most notably Nazi Germany's Berlin Olympics in 1936. The first torch relay was, in fact, created at those Games as a show of German might. Later, the Olympic innocence was lost - again in Germany - at the Munich games of 1972, when Israeli athletes were shot dead, and the process was solidified with the cold-war boycotts of the 1980 Moscow Olympics and those in Los Angeles four years later.
The Olympics is not as special an occasion as it once was. We no longer have to wait three years and 50 weeks for the world to come together; it happens regularly, albeit not on such a grandiose scale, on the sports field, in conference and exhibition halls and at arts festivals. Modern communications are such that travel is not even necessary to break down barriers and build unity.