Panem et circenses

... nam qui dabat olim imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, panem et circenses.

(... for they who once conferred military command, high civil office, legions, everything, now restrain themselves and anxiously hope for just two things: bread and circuses.)

Juvenal, Satire X

Kiri Te Kanawa, from New Zealand, appears on German TV, wearing a German flag as a dress. She's literally wrapped in the flag.

"Ich habe mich in euch verliebt, ihr Deutsche," she says. "Und euer köstlicher Yorkshire Puddings. Mmm. So, dieser Olympischen Spiele werde Ich in der Ecke des Deutschlandsmannshaft sein." She raises her hand aloft and challenges us "Wer ist mit mir?"

Then a sort of Caribbean arrangement of "Deutschland uber Alles" (the old version with the uncomfortable supremacist lyrics) plays in the background while a succession of people in unrelated everyday situations declare "Wir sind in der Ecke des Deutschlandsmannshaft."

Yes, this is completely ridiculous and I made it all up.

But it is no more ridiculous than what we saw on British TV during the Olympics: Hawaiian Nicole Scherzinger advertising a popular German dairy product by wrapping herself in the Union Flag, declaring herself to be in "Team GB's corner" and asking "who's with me?" as a succession of salt-of-the-earth British types pledge their allegiance and a cosy, nonthreatening arrangement of the supremacist anthem "Rule Britannia" plays in the background to extol our superiority and rouse our patriotism.

Yoghurt and the Olympics. Bread and circuses.

The Summer Games of the 31st Olympiad in Rio de Janeiro have concluded, and we can now review them in full.

Two things stand out for me:

• The exceptional human achievements of the athletes, which it was a privilege to watch, and 
• The utterly dismal, shallow and jingoistic British media coverage, which served to cheapen and diminish everything it remarked upon. 

It was Team GB as light entertainment. It was Strictly Athletics, filling in the schedule before the next series of The Great British Bake Off and Britain's Got Talent kick off.

I am sick of tedious interviews, repeated ad nauseam, with athletes sitting on the celebrity sofa in the studio, being asked how they feel about their event, or how their mum feels about their event, or how their cat feels about their event. Tell us how you feel. How did it make you feel to win/lose? Tell us! Let our audience use you to emote with a flick of the remote.

I really don't need to know how they feel, and I am sure there is a lot they would often prefer not to discuss, but always the media are there like parasites, insisting, intruding, and using us, the audience, as their justification. And the athletes comply because of some spurious sense of obligation we have inflicted on them, some convenient myth that they are doing it "for their country" and that they are in some way indebted to us. Which really is just our way of taking these supreme human specimens and making them our bitches.

The medal table serves no athletic purpose. It exists only to let us undeserving couch potatoes feel good and look down on other people, those foreign couch potatoes, the other ones who would come over here and steal our couches, even though we have run no race, thrown no javelin. Citius, Altius, Fortius ("faster, higher, stronger") is replaced by "louder, lazier, smugger."

The medal table does not let the mediocre excel. It makes the excellent mediocre by reducing their accomplishments to a mere boast for the rest of us to borrow and abuse. The athlete's renown is subordinated to the lazy notoriety craved by the bigot who hijacks their triumphs to celebrate post-Brexit Britain. The athletes' sacrifice, the knowledge they gain, the human capabilities they discover in themselves and demonstrate to the gods, are considered noteworthy only if they confirm our petty assumptions and prejudices, our Great British sense of superiority. This is the party Number 10 invites us to when it claims our athletes' success demonstrates the benefits of the Union.

The first time the Olympics had a significant TV audience was in 1936. The venue was Berlin. The Nazis invented the Olympic torch relay to enhance the occasion's PR potential. Germany broke spending records and topped the medal table. We all know what point they were trying to make.