Couch Potato Cultivation

Nige considers the Olympic games:

If ever there was a festival of couch potato cultivation, it's the Olympics. It only exists, in its grotesquely bloated modern form, because of the huge worldwide TV audience - and many of the sports represented only exist, to the outside world, as a once-every-four-years TV spectacle. What sort of crowd does the average weightlifting event attract? Where, indeed, would one find such a thing? Yet, come the Olympics, weightlifting's up there with the rest, suddenly being gawped at by millions of couch potatoes. Because the Olympics is fundamentally a TV event, it makes very little sense to build special venues for most of the events. That only leaves a legacy of expensive white elephants - the one sure Olympic legacy we can realistically look forward to. The sponsors and the TV companies should knock up temporary structures - sets, as it were - and take them down when it's all over. As it is, the likeliest 'legacy' of the London Olympics will be not only rotting, redundant venues (this is already the case post-Athens) but also decades of debt - remember Montreal...