The just ending Rio Olympics will no doubt go down in history as indifferent, as nothing to write home about.

The Games have afforded us the usual mix of talent, courage and endurance and they have once again allowed us to be awed by the beauty, grace and symmetry of our betters. For our betters they are, those who can accomplish feats that make them look like they hang out with the gods.

That is but ordinary Olympic fare, and we ordinary mortals expect nothing less from these extraordinary creatures.

We gather before our TV screens to gawk and marvel and go away to our respective beds still wrapped in the magic.

Another thing is now becoming commonplace, and that is the expectation that there will be cheating in one form or another.

The lure of fortune and fame, of which Olympic triumph serves up generous doses, has pushed way too many Olympians to try sly and underhand methods to best their rivals. One of these is drug abuse.

The issue of doping took centrestage a few weeks before the opening of the Games and, up to the very last moment, the governing bodies of the various disciplines represented at Rio had not made up their minds as to how to deal with some of the more egregious cases of systemic drug abuse, especially where such delinquency was state-sponsored. That was the case with Russia.

In the end, Kenya, which had also been placed under scrutiny, was allowed to compete, and at the last minute, the blanket ban on Russian athletes was relaxed, and both Kenyan and (some) Russian competitors went on to enhance our watching pleasure. It is to be hoped that nations and individuals involved in the Olympic movement will take all the measures necessary to weed out drug cheats who hurt sport generally.

Other forms of cheating

It may also be necessary to acknowledge other forms of cheating, especially those indulged in by sporting officials, as was alleged at Rio this past week.

Though we usually tend to associate sporting hooliganism with the Fifa rogues in Switzerland – football management is apparently a natural magnet for crooks – more miscreants lurk in the shrubbery. Nor should we forget that members of the International Olympic Committee were found not long ago to have lined their pockets to facilitate the Salt Lake City Winter Games.

You could also have “robbery victims who were not robbed at all!

The whole catalogue of cheating athletes, such athletes’ handlers, state sponsors of such cheating, officials on the take, non-robbery victims, and those officials who hoard tickets with the goal of flogging them at some time, is a list of shame, a blot on the Games. Each one of them should be tracked down and consigned to jail where the whole nefarious lot belongs.

Misbehaving home fans

But what do you do with a crowd of home fans who, eager to advantage their own sporting heroes, distract their competitors with boos, jeers and catcalls? That is what the Brazilian fans at Rio did to the French pole-vaulter challenging his Brazilian rival for the gold. The Brazilian won, unfortunately.

The Brazilians were at it again when the Swedish female soccer team was engaging their Brazilian counterparts, and the Brazilian fans were taunting one of the Swedish women with a medical condition because of issues of pigmentation and the Brazilian sun.

The chants of “Zika” directed at her by the Brazilian fans clearly looked to destabilise this poor girl and make her lose her concentration, and so help the home team to win. Sweden won, fortunately.

What do you do? When you catch drug cheats, you can ban them from competing for a given length of time. When you get hold of a sports official on the take, you have the option of banning them for life from holding leadership positions for life, and even sending them to jail.

But what do you do when the offenders are a whole two-thirds of the spectators, the home country fans? In such cases, there is no doubt that the home crowd seeks to cow the opposition by making them uncomfortable, but is that enough reason to punish the whole crowd or their competitor?

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]