Yesterday I posted a rant about how the Olympics ought to be depoliticized and treated as a game rather than a political spectacle.  Of course this in itself is a naive aspiration, since (as one of the commenters to my post rightly remarked) by its very nature the Olympics plays into our atavistic nineteenth century nationalisms, with nations sending their best athletes to compete for a countable stack of medals, to be tallied up at the end like coins.