Ten years ago, I started writing this post. It was during the 2014 Olympics, and I came to a realization that I sat on and neglected to express, until now.

For most of my teen and young adult years, I was crazed about Olympic season: it was always on in the background, I tracked the medal tallies, I followed my favorite athletes (Yuna Kim was mine), I prayed for their success, I relished the opening and closing ceremonies, and I thought I would never miss an Olympic Games for the rest of my life.

Well, what began in 2014 is now fully fruited in 2024: I will watch the Olympics no more.

I realized a decade back how passe the Olympic accomplishments were: one moment the “world” (by which I mean people who had enough time to spend on spectating) cheers and roars with an athlete’s victory — the next moment it seeks a greater victor. The world soon forgets its champions, for the world cares not for its children, for the world is not a mother, nor is it a friend: “… friendship with the world is enmity with God” (St. James’ Epistle, Ch. 4).

It dawned on me how useless all the fanfare was. Sure, compete and strive! The human achievements reached by Olympian athletes are astounding, but almost everyone forgets just a few days later — definitely a few years later! There is always a faster, higher, stronger athlete. It’s like the news cycle: here one day and gone the next.

So that really helped me reprioritize what I should do every Olympic cycle: be super selective what contests I viewed, and how much I viewed. Life was more important than what the world told me to watch, and then itself forgot next month.

But now…

Now that the Olympics mocks the glory of Jesus Christ at His Last Supper, now that the flimsy five Olympic rings forsake the Lord who crowns true victors and victresses (yes, traditional Latin-based English has a feminine for female champions, because women deserve their own vocabulary!), now that the Paris Olympics blasphemes and defiles the Holy Trinity who made and saved all humanity… now I MOCK, FORSAKE, BLASPHEME, and DEFILE the Olympics.

Not the athletes who are true and honest in their disciplines: they I do not spurn, but they do deserve a worthy place of respectful competition, not the pathetic joke the Olympics has become. They deserve better than the rampant fornication and adultery in the athletes’ dorms, the corrupt marketing and commercialization of the athletes by wicked corporations engaging in sweatshop slavery and complicit in China’s death camps, and the cesspool of sex-and-child-trafficking around the Olympic host cities. Not to mention: the bankruptcy that follows in the aftermath of the Olympics, where gluttonous host cities spend wastefully on a temporary celebration of temporary success; the political failure that allows sportwashing, where host nations ruled by murderous tyrants get to show off a facade of success to a gullible globe; and other pitiful goofs that only miseducated elitists can do, like repeatedly call South Korea by their genocidal northern neighbor’s name.

Anyway, what more need be said about the sad state of the Olympics’ administrators (idolaters)? Are they even about sports and athletics anymore? Or is it just a confusing mashup of pet woke causes at best, and demonic scheming at worst?

God will judge them and give them what they’re truly competing for: the deepest cesspit of hell. May they all repent and believe in His Gospel.

Great commentary on this issue, by a Christian art expert and iconographer: