“The Army decided I should be on the all-American ping-pong team. We were the first Americans to visit the land of China in like a million years or something like that, and somebody said that world peace was in our hands. But all I did was play ping-pong.” – Tom Hanks as the title character in the film “Forrest Gump”

Late July into August is usually the worst time of year for sports fanatics.

Baseball is lumbering into the second half of the season, but it is too early to pay much attention to the playoff race. Football is in talking season. And soccer … y’all, I have tried to get into soccer. Honestly, I tried. I do not think it is going to work out between us.

Luckily, once every four years we get a reprieve with the Summer Olympics. I get a kick out of hearing Rowdy Gaines’ voice rise an octave when a world record in the 100-meter butterfly may fall and educating myself about the finer aspects of ribbon twirls and spirals during rhythmic gymnastics.

Yet, sports, in general, and the Olympics, in particular, become more difficult to enjoy with the increasing problematic issues that accompany them. As usual, many problems can be traced back to money.

Bribery of International Olympic Committee members by cities hoping to be named the host site of the Olympic Games appears to be commonplace. The AP previously reported accusations of vote buying to sway the selection process in favor of Rio de Janeiro in 2016 and Tokyo in 2021 led to the removal of several members of the IOC.

Last month French police searched the headquarters of the organizers of this year’s Paris Olympic Games as part of corruption investigations into contracts for the Games, according to the AP.

Salt Lake City was just announced as the host for the 2034 Winter Olympics last week. Its hosting of the 2002 Winter Olympics led to multiple probes into the organizing effort which found provisions of “more than $1 million in cash, scholarships, health care, expensive gifts and other favors to IOC members and their family members,” according to a report by The Salt Lake Tribune.

Beyond bribery the cost of hosting the Olympics can be a tremendous burden to the host country and city. Budgets consistently go over original estimates, some slightly and some extravagantly.  The Rio de Janeiro Games went more the 300 percent over budget, according to a study by two University of Oxford Business School professors.

A study by the Council on Foreign Relations found the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics to be the only time in the modern Olympic era where a profit was made for the host city.

The study believes this was due to Los Angeles being the only city to bother submitting a bid to host that year, allowing the city to favorably negotiate the revenue with the IOC, and the infrastructure already in place for sport and tourism in Los Angeles which required little additional construction.

A smaller-scale example of cost overruns is when Birmingham hosted the 2022 World Games – an event similar to the Olympics but less grandiose. Organizers were left with a debt of more than $15 million. Much of the tab was picked up by Alabama and Birmingham-area taxpayers.

I could mention other controversies – state-sponsored performance-enhancing drug programs, abandoned venues left to rot after the completion of the Games and sweeps to remove the homeless population to improve the host city’s image during the Games.

This year we even had disgruntled Parisians literally threatening to poop in the Seine River in an attempt to make the river too polluted for open water events as well as images from the opening ceremony many people viewed as sacrilegious to Christianity.

If you enjoy watching the Olympics, it is not my intention to make you feel badly for doing so. I have watched parts of every Olympics for as long as I can remember. It may be more of a commentary on modern culture that most major events seem to provide more opportunities to divide than unite.

The Council on Foreign Relations report says the IOC is at least working toward reforms such as “reducing the cost of bidding, allowing hosts more flexibility in using already-existing sports facilities, encouraging bidders to develop a sustainability strategy and increasing outside auditing and other transparency measures.”

How well all this  can be carried out by an institution so prone to corruption and profit chasing remains to be seen, but these are ideas even the East German judge would score a 10.