The curtain goes up on the London Olympic Games 2012 today evening with an opening ceremony to beat all ceremonies. For days now, the run-up to the Games has been spiked with stories about doping cheats (the International Olympic Committee or IOC has promised the cleanest ever Games), London’s traffic woes, queues at airports, two toilets to six athletes and other accounts which might make the reader think that the Games are the greatest pain on earth.

Even before London had revved up for the Games, there were reports of how certain Olympic officials are corrupt, the number of palms that have to be greased for a country to get the Olympics and how drug cheats are finding new ways to mask the substances. There are books with titles like Fraud of the Rings, telling the reader what the Olympics really and truly are, (the blinkers must fall off) despite all those sterling ideals they purportedly uphold.