The games are a global grift run by one of the most corrupt, scandal-ridden bodies in sports history. The International Olympic Committee is happy to massively rip off whatever sucker cities and countries are dumb enough to beg for the right to host them. (I’m looking at you, Los Angeles!). Like vampires, they suck their hosts dry while providing legitimacy to tyrants and monsters such as Adolf Hitler, Leonid Brezhnev, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping.

More important, they are the embodiment of a worn-out, collectivist 20th-century attitude toward competition among nations that makes no sense in our increasingly globalized, individualistic world. The modern games got started in 1896 by French aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin as a way of reviving Gallic national pride after his country got its ass kicked by Germany in the Franco-Prussian War. That’s why athletes represent countries rather than themselves. And it’s also why the Olympics were politically charged to the hilt throughout the 20th century, such as in the 1936 Berlin games, which Hitler overtly staged as a showcase for rising German military might and aggression.