1) Greed. A more reprehensible concentration of greedy, unprincipled hypocrites would be impossible to find outside of a convention of sports agents. Come to think of it, all the sports agents are probably in Sydney right now. One well-placed thermonuclear device would do the world a lot of good.

2) Appeals to patriotism. Let's drop the pretense. Olympic medals should go to corporate sponsors, not countries. That's where most of the athletes' loyalties lie.

3) Junk food. What's the "official" Olympic snack food this time around, Snickers or Three Musketeers? Precisely what training regimen are candy bars a staple of? And what happens if you're caught snacking on non-official junk food? Do you lose medals if caught eating a Kit Kat bar? When do we start doing blood tests for Milky Ways?

4) Bela Karolyi. Football for girls is what U.S. women's gymnastics has become under this guy. Romania's answer to Bob Knight. Does any activity in the world cause more fearsome injuries to pre-high schoolers?

5) Really stupid sports. Bludgeoned by appeals to patriotism, one-world-ism and goodwill toward our fellow man, we feel guilty for not watching hours and hours of silly activities that we care absolutely nothing about during non-Olympic years, the kind of sports you wouldn't watch if the only other thing available was reruns of "Family Feud" on the Game Show Channel. Sorry if I've offended anyone from the light air rifle shooting (is there also heavy air rifle shooting?), ballroom dancing or "rhythmic gymnastics" lobbies. (I'm not positive about this, but I bet that rhythmic gymnastics, which features young girls running around waving ribbons, is the only Olympic event inspired by a Fellini movie.)

6) Sex gossip. As in the snide references in the press regarding the alleged sexual preferences of some athletes. Who cares? Gays have been winning gold medals since "Xena" was on live TV. The important thing is that our gays kick the crap out of their gays.

7) Team sports. Excuse me, but why do we even have team sports in the Olympics? Aren't there already enough World Cups or Davis Cups or Ryder Cups? And if there aren't, why not leave it to the businessmen in those sports to create their own championships? Wasn't the original Olympic ideal predicated on the basis of individual achievement? What goodwill comes out of a Nike basketball team stomping Angola by 60 points?

8) Sports that are scored with numbers. This includes any so-called sport where an elite group of pain-in-the-butt purists get together to decide that the aesthetic of one person's performance was "9.8" and another's only "9.3" in some activity that all the rest of us have no knowledge of or interest in. Let's make it simple: A sport is something that anybody can score, something that makes you sweat. Anything determined by someone's subjective theories of aesthetic beauty and performed to a recording of "Pachelbel's Canon in D" is not a sport.

9) Olympic mascots. "Syd the platypus" "Olly the kookaburra," "Millie the anteater." Who in God's name dreamed up these monstrosities? These things look like the result of drunken sex between Crocodile Dundee and Pikachu.

10) Synchronized swimming. This probably belongs under a couple of other numbers, but to me it deserves its own special category. Who, I wonder, is the Babe Ruth of synchronized swimming? The Michael Jordan? The Jackie Robinson? Are there colleges that give athletic scholarships to synchronized swimmers? Do they give sex tests to synchronized swimmers? And what in the wide, wide world of sports is solo synchronized swimming? If you're swimming solo, what do you synchronize with?

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