The View | Rio 2016 Olympics: The Crying Games

The Olympic Games melt the hardest of cynical hearts. For all the power, strength and toughness of the athletes, Rio 2016 will go down as the Crying Games as tears of happiness, disappointment, loss and victory have flowed from huge weightlifters to tiny trampoliners.

The actors take on Shakespearean characteristics as they “imitate the action of the tiger, stiffen the sinews and disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage” before so many burst into floods of tears. Tough global competitors Mo Farah, Novak Djokovic, Serena Williams, Sun Yang and Kristi Armstrong, tennis finalists Andy Murray and Juan Martin del Potro as well as divers Jack Laugher and Chris Mears blubbed like babies to the world in the face of victory or defeat.

For the effort of seeing athletes go Citius, Altius and Fortius (faster, higher, stronger) is steeped in emotion – which is why we lose ourselves for those seconds just before they reach for the wall of the pool, sprint the last 50 metres to the tape or move so elegantly through gymnastics routine.

Sport brings out the best in human nature, but while we are holding our breath, it also brings out the worst as dark forces peer out from behind the curtains. While we are enthralled by the emotion, for them, the race is about making money faster, getting higher status and strengthening their business contacts. These are the men in suits, the “old farts” as former England rugby captain Will Carling once called them.

The buck stops at the International Olympic Committee, which as a group gives the impression of not only having its snouts in the trough, but its two front trotters as well. Most are third-rate former athletes who demand to be treated like heads of state, with executive jet travel, private driving lanes and motorcades around the host city. Former committee president Juan Antonio Samaranch insisted he be called “His Excellency” and presided over an explosion of drug-taking, epitomised by Ben Johnson at Seoul 1988. A year later, 20 committee members were expelled or sanctioned for the “acceptance of gifts”. Just on Wednesday, senior member James Hickey resigned after allegedly being caught selling Rio event tickets to touts.

It is an all-powerful system where committee members serve for 30 years or more, building pyramids of patronage with the power to crush whistle-blowers. For them, it is definitely “the taking part”. They have power of success and failure over any athlete and so rub shoulders with some very important people.