I'm a pretty solid sports fan. I've taken road trips to North Carolina for hockey playoff games, traveled across the country to get to Grey Cup games, and sat outside for what was reportedly the coldest National Football League game in history. I'm the sort of person who will plan vacations to ensure that I'm not away during prime playoff seasons, and whose first memory of any specific year from my childhood is how far the Blue Jays advanced that season.

Understand, then, that I want to like the Olympics. But try as I might, I just can't do it.

It's not so much the drug scandals, which - if we're going to be honest about this - could happen in almost any professional sports league that tests properly. But there are just so many other reasons to dislike the Games.

There's the way it's suddenly considered sacrilege to continue ignoring sports that I quite reasonably spend the rest of my life ignoring (synchronized diving, badminton, equestrian ... the list goes on and on) just because they're all lumped together into one giant festival of sports I don't care about. There's the self-importance of the international Olympic community, which insists on referring to itself as the "Olympic Movement'' and claims that "Olympism is a state of mind.'' There's the way it pushes everything else off the airwaves and news pages, making it more impossible to ignore than the Super Bowl, the Stanley Cup finals, or any other event that people I know actually watch.

But what really gets under my skin, more than all the other factors combined, is what it does to this country every four years.

The other day, I flipped on the local sports radio station - hoping, though I should have known better, that the chatter would be about something other than what's going on in Athens. Instead, I found the host - a transplanted Chicagoan, but apparently a bit of a Canadian flag-waver nevertheless - demanding to know why there isn't more of a patriotic outcry over our woeful medal count.

I'm not sure what universe he's living in, but I wish I could join him there. Because where I am, there's no escaping all the agonizing about what effect our failings in the pool, on the track or on the mats will have on our worth as a nation.

"Until the love of sport we increasingly demonstrate in our personal time translates into political pressure, we will remain a nation of also-rans,'' Susan Riley concluded on this page earlier this week. I suppose that's true, insofar as our status as top-flight contenders in sports that we spend 99 per cent of our lives ignoring. But does it really mean anything beyond that?

From all corners, we're told that it does. Every four years, commentators who spend most of their lives decrying government spending on legitimate social priorities (of whom, in fairness, Ms. Riley is not one), proceed to make the case that the $90-million we spend on amateur athletes isn't nearly enough. Throwing more money at health care or affordable housing is apparently frivolous, but tossing it at jumpers and judokas until they start bringing home more medals makes perfect sense.

None of this is meant as an attack on the dedicated folks who train around the clock for a shot at Olympic glory. But surely, we're not looking at multi-million-dollar program boosts just so a few athletes get a chance to compete internationally.

Advocates of increased funding like to make the case that a healthy Olympic program makes for healthy Canadians. The argument, particularly popular now that we're bombarded with stories about our obesity epidemic, is that children and adults alike will be inspired by our Olympic heroes to get more active. But if it were really about getting everyday kids in shape, we'd be looking at increased funding for physical education programs, not Olympic training. And as for adults, exercise routines (or lack thereof) are already set; it's hard to imagine many of us are so impressionable that we'll take up a new sport just because one of our countrymen succeeded at it.

What all of the hand-wringing about our Olympic performance really boils down to, much more than concern over our collective physical fitness, is a sense that our athletes' success somehow validates us as a nation - which, when you think about it, is slightly pathetic.

There are many things that make this country what it is. A few of them might even be sports-related - like our love affair with hockey, for instance, and the improbable endurance of the Canadian Football League. But if we're really compelled to hang our heads abroad because of our poor performance in obscure amateur sports, as some of the more shrill voices invariably suggest during the Summer Games, then the Olympic community - sorry, movement - has really pulled a fast one on us.