This is a joke and will accomplish nothing. By allowing our athletes to go, we're allowing another brutal dictatorship to have a propaganda victory. You'd think we'd have learned from 1936, but I guess not.

Good comment from a caller to the radio earlier - what's so precious & special about our athletes that it becomes inconceivable for them to miss an Olympics, especially when sending an important message to a rotten dictatorship is far more morally important than the cheap nationalist thrills gained from winning medals? I get that they train hard for years but there's much more important factors involved here than catering to some niche sports that a few thousand people in our country even bother paying any attention at all to. Each and every Olympics in China, and in Russia too, should be automatically boycotted by every Western country. Not only would it slap Beijing and Moscow hard right across their murderous faces, it would also be a great kick in the ass to the corrupt monsters at the IOC who blatantly award the games based only on who can give them the biggest bribes.

The entire Olympic system is a scam. It's time to leave it altogether until it's either cleaned up from top to bottom, or replaced completely by something honest, clean, and credible.

Let's add that there's nothing amateur about these amateur athletes. Most are financially supported so they can focus exclusively on their sport. There's a reason rich countries win the vast majority of medals and it's directly related to investment, government or private, into winning.

There will be and always has been fantastic heart-warming stories every Olympics, but it's just not enough to hold up the whole rotting edifice.

The entire Olympic system is a scam. It's time to leave it altogether until it's either cleaned up from top to bottom, or replaced completely by something honest, clean, and credible.