Let the games begin

The Olympics has begun.

Even as I type these words, there are people who are running as fast as they can, jumping high obstacles and using all their strength to overcome hurdles. But let us not worry about what goes on at the US - Mexican border.

Because, dear friends, the eyes of the world are on China where the best athletes are competing against one another to claim the ultimate prize – an Olympic Gold which China claims is lead free.

The origin of these games was in ancient Greece when one day all their email servers went down due to a power outage. History books refer to this period as the ‘Dark Age’. As result, one person was hired whose sole job was to run between two cities carrying messages. Sometimes he would run even when there were no messages to be sent, thus was born the marathon.

Meanwhile, all the men of the city would get together and play other games till the messenger returned. They called it the ‘Olympic Games’ as a tribute to the famous camera company - Olympus. The reason why it is held once every four years is because that’s how long it took for the messenger guy to run back to his city.

Did you know that the early Olympics was held only for men?. They did not even bother to dress themselves and just played in the nude. No wonder that Greek Gods are so popular with women even today. As entertaining as it was, this practice was stopped after the introduction of wrestling into Olympics, to ensure that no player got an unfair advantage over the other.

That’s about enough of history of the Olympics, today the number of games have significantly increased. There is participation from the world over. This time as it is being held in China and China being communist, their plan was that all the medals would be shared equally by all participants. But the plan was opposed by the US which wanted all medals for itself. As a compromise, it was decided that only the top three would be awarded medals in any sport.

India has not had much success in the Olympics except for a lone medal or two. This is because athletes from other countries resort to unfair means of play like better training and better government support.

However, for the first time in India’s Olympic history, we finally managed to bag a Gold in an individual sports event. The Indian government quickly denied any links to this unexpected event and has assured the nation that any help that the government may have provided was purely by chance and that such an oversight would not happen again.

As the games continue into the next week and many more medals are to be won, we the billion of us in India will hope that a few more medals come our way.

But let us remember to test them all for lead.