Olympic Truce Or Olympic Truth

Every Olympics the organizers call for an Olympic truce, during which time the people of the world will hopefully lay down their arms and watch a little television.

Or something like that. We can try to imagine such a world, but apologies to John Lennon, it is hard to do.

This Olympics, like the last in Athens in 2004, is being held under the backdrop of a probably never ending war against "terror", and the real war in Iraq. While Israel has athletes at the Turin games, and Iran sent a skier, the Middle East is poorly represented (yeah, yeah, too warm to develop winter sport athletes you say). Nevertheless, you'd have thought we'd have trained a couple of Iraqis just to make a show for democracy in Italy, but things are obviously not in good enough shape in Iraq, despite Bush's suggestions things are getting better, to have produced a downhill skier that might complete the course in four minutes as opposed to two. Next time perhaps.

So will we get a truce? That remains to be seen. Unfortunately, the sad truth is that few in many of the countries in turmoil have access to a television, or one with reliable power to begin with.