The Guardian hates the Olympics.

In unsurprising news, The Online Department Of All That Is Morally Correct And Globally Progressive, has finally had a blogger’s head explode at the sight of Britain doing well at the Olympics.

Simon Jenkins recent article on the whole affair sums up their sneering condescension position on Olympic sport well. But he’s far from the only one. The likes of sports writer Marina Hyde have also been dispatched this August to slate the Olympics. Several articles this month already from Marina, including “Blame the IOC not Brazil”, “Why don’t we just let Olympians dope” and “Olympics is more sleazy than FIFA”. I don’t have the will to link to all the rest of the random guardian opinion vomiter’s blogs decrying other parts of the Olympics.

The problem the Guardian has is that all the great things about the Olympics that normal people enjoy, are either the antithesis of Guardian’s particular worldview, or, do an incredibly succinct job of disproving it.

First up (trigger warning)..

Flags.

(and countries)

Guardian’s resident Britain hater Simon Jenkins today compared displaying the flag of the country whom you compete for as akin to Hitler’s Nazism. And BBC coverage to far right BNP. No, I am not joking. The flag waving has just got too much for the self-hating private school and Oxbridge grads that make up the Guardian’s offices. How base of us to show a tiny semblance of general, abstract, completely benign national togetherness. We’re supposed to be neatly divided, it creates more clicks.

That’s the most notable thing about the flag waving at the Olympics, it’s friendly and co-operative. The sight of flag wavers from different countries happily and frequently hugging each other is obviously just too much for the Guardian to take in today’s world.

You’d have to be, bluntly, a complete idiot to think it was anything other than positive good spirited togetherness with your teammates, the people who came and supported you etc. It’s completely non-hostile. Olympics are actually our best example of how having nations competing is actually a positive thing for countries relations when done in a spirit of Olympic togetherness (as displayed in one way by Andy Murray). If only the same national togetherness was visible in the halls of the EU, where most countries can’t seem to stand the sight of each other.

Medals Table.

Thanks to carefully concentrated Lottery funding (the idea, oddly, of a John Major Tory government) Great Britain sits second, ahead of China. This is unacceptable. Funding has equaled success. How can we possibly allow such a thing to happen. What is this, The Empire? Who do we think we are beating other countries at sports? The shame.

The positive ideas behind competition I’m guessing aren’t hot topics of conversation around the Guardian water coolers. Competition is generally discouraged. They’re the types who prefer “no winners or losers” events at their kids sports days.

The method of funding success has also been a huge grieving embarrassment at the Guardian. In recent years, UK Sport has been rewarding sports that have proven to be successful with more cash, that has been taken from sports where we aren’t so successful. This individualist self determining approach, is anathema to the lefties at the Guardian, who have written that it’s a disgrace that funding isn’t equally doled out to all sports.

I understand this view, but we used to fund sports more equally, we also used to only win 1 Gold medal, like in Atlanta 1996. It wasn’t working, so we changed to a a method that does. It’s not all about winning, but it does help to have winners in Olympics to inspire people to take up sport.

Doping.

I’ve talked about a trend developing in intellectual liberal circles regarding allowing doping in sports. These Olympics have pushed Marina Hyde to join Simon Jenkins in calling for us to ‘just legalise’ drugs in sport. They both also said doping is bad. One of them is a sports writer so should be aware it would kill sport dead, the other isn’t, and by the sounds of it may want just that.

In a typically confused position, they decry the Olympics for being full of drugs, while in further lines call for us to ‘just legalise’ them to make “sport fairer” (I’ve written a lot about how non-sensical this idea is). It’s a bizarre mental gymnastics.

So if they had one good point about why Olympics were bad, it would be doping, yet they’re so incompetent at making coherent points they’ve scuttled their own ship, in actually endorsing doping (in the same article!), for some vague and misguided reason that “sport isn’t fair”.

But also, the Olympics is just about the best example of why we don’t want doping to be allowed in sports. Anyone watching and enjoying it agrees. “Sport isn’t fair, let’s let science take over!” cry Guardian types, however the Olympics underline, without the need for words, why this position is so wrongheaded.

Feminism.

It’s hard to talk about the Guardian without mentioning the F word as they possibly publish at least 5 blogs or articles a day on the subject but the Olympics have really damaged the office’s cooling system sent their hoards of feminist bloggers into meltdown.

Because the sight of the entire country, and the world, fawning over, celebrating, positively reveling in all the successful self-determining female athletes we produce is kind of not the picture of the women-hating world the Guardian’s writers like to tell us we live in, and contribute to.

Simon Jenkins even had a good old moan at the sheer amount of love Laura Trott, Britain’s most successful ever female athlete, was getting. Too much for Jenkins. He’s had enough he said. He wanted to hear the news about Anjem Choudary, tax fines, and Brexit fears he said. He didn’t want to, or realise he could just use the internet, or change channel to BBC News. He just wanted this damn successful woman off his screen.

The Olympics love-in for Women’s Sport presents awkward questions for Guardian’s brand of feminism, because apparently we hate women’s sport.

One of the biggest news stories this Olympics has been that of Caster Semanya, the apparently intersex athlete with raised testosterone levels who competes, and wins quite easily, in the women’s 800m. You’d think, on first glance, this would be right up Guardian’s street. Yet while other news outlets have been all over reporting this story, Guardian have been largely silent.

There’s clearly been some editorial decision not to report on Semanya. Throughout all of August so far there’s only been 1 real story, buried away in their obscure political science section, with only 12 comments. Why would this be?

It’s hard to say, and here it gets very very tricky to unravel the contradictory ideas present in many of Guardian’s feminist arguments. Semanya’s incredible story raises very unwanted questions for the particular type of extremist feminist we often see today. There are many mainstream feminists today who are quite open about how people should never speak about any biological differences between men and women having any relevance in the real world, as it is seen as sexist to do so, and you are simply legitimising the patriarchy, and justifying the Nazis, etc.

But if we focus on why Guardian doesn’t want to get involved. It’s a bizarre thing, because considering the swell of social media support for Semanya, they’d be all over it. The problem is, Semanya being intersex and competing in the women’s event threatens to unravel many of the arguments they propose.

Say if Guardian writers come out and support her, of course she should be running in the women’s events, seems like a fairly obvious point to take. But they might well find genuine unarguable objections to that stance. For instance, would they also support trans Bruce Jenner, if he decided to make the switch to the female Caitlyn Jenner when he was in his 20’s, swimming in the Olympics, to compete with the women?

Awkward questions. So easily raised by something like the Olympics.

Like Semanya, Jenner would have (even higher) hugely raised male testosterone levels to the other female competitors, and the race, in most people’s opinion, including the athletes, would be too unfair. Jenner would be at doping levels of testosterone. What would Guardian’s feminist bloggers response to such questions be? We don’t know. Amazingly they’re not getting involved.

Thanks to these annoying Olympics it gets very difficult to logically defend many of these arguments, and in turn undermines them. Same with the funding debate. Same with the idea sports are unfair and we should dope. Overall, they’ve decided to ignore Caster Semanya because it’s just an awkward question for the Guardian’s worldview raised by the Olympics that they wish would just go away.