THE LAST STRAW: Forget the men's 200-metre thigh-stroke final, or whatever it was. The most exciting finish of the week happened not in Athens but in Dublin, where on Wednesday, an Irish team emerged triumphant - literally and metaphorically - in the Port Tunnel (heavy digging class) event. Frank McNally was there.
The small crowd of digging enthusiasts present burst into spontaneous applause as the team climbed out of the ground, having completed the 4.5 km course in a new Irish record of just under two-and-a-half years.
Most of the team wore their national colours for the occasion. For some, this meant the Irish jersey. But reflecting the high level of dual citizenship on the team, most wore the green and gold of their native Donegal: a semi-autonomous region north of Leitrim which - while officially ruled from Dublin - has its own laws in such areas as culture and policing. Digging is the national sport of Donegal, which also dominated the team that emerged victorious from the Channel Tunnel, more than a decade ago.
The focus of Wednesday's event was supposed to be the Tunnel Boring Machine (or "TBM") breaking through the last few inches of rock. Engineers had even punched in the rock beforehand so we could see the giant screw at work. Unfortunately, TBMs proceed at about the same speed as the judicial system. And after the first 45 minutes or so, the spectacle of the screw turning was only slightly more exciting than the Olympic dressage competition.
So they switched off the machine, eventually, to allow the media interview/champagne drinking part of the proceedings to begin. Something that was then completely upstaged when the diggers started climbing out of the tunnel, through holes in the front of the TBM. It was a sight disturbingly suggestive of worms vacating an organism that had just had a worm-dose (apologies to any readers having breakfast). But the applause was genuine, and the flag-waving did not seem out of place.
It occurred to me there and then that if digging were an Olympic discipline, Ireland (or at least Donegal) would be guaranteed medals every time. And this raises the question of why digging is not an Olympic discipline. After all, the other big staple of the construction industry - weightlifting - is already well represented. And not because of its entertainment value.
I notice RTÉ has assigned Ronan Collins - better known for the Lotto draw - to cover the weight lifting. But he might as well be doing the commentary in his neutral Lotto style ("Now for the next competitor . . . and it's number 26. Twenty-six. The fifth competitor now.") for all the excitement the event engenders. This is not to mention the sport's other issues. For weight-lifting to acquire entertainment value, the competitors would need to be sober and the audience on drugs: the exact reverse of the current situation.
When we asked one of the Donegal diggers to compare the Channel tunnel project with the Dublin job, his answer was technical. The TBM used in Dublin was "a bigger bore", he said (and after staring at it for an hour, none of the journalists was prepared to disagree). But Olympic digging couldn't be a bigger bore than weight-lifting, or clay-pigeon shooting, or umpteen other sports.
The Donegal lads also admitted candidly that the "big money" available to tunnellers was their main motivation. Amateurism never really caught on in digging. But again, this would be no impediment in the modern Olympics. In fact, the only challenge would be to find competitive formats for the sport.
And the possibilities here are endless: from shovel-relay races (track), to synchronised digging (field), to a possible "Hibernian Combined" event (cross-country tunnelling, with pipe-laying), and so on.
Construction is fundamental to the Olympic ideal. Half the drama of any games is whether the stadiums will be finished in time. It's the misfortune of modern Greece to live in the shadow of ancient Greece, a civilisation whose achievements seem as distant and untouchable now as a world record set by an East German women's team in the 1980s (which raises the question: what were those ancient Greeks on?). But whatever glory modern Greece takes from these games is more likely to derive from the success of the construction project than from its athletes.
And we know exactly how that feels. The current range of Olympic sports - wide as it is - doesn't seem to suit our culture and traditions. Whereas if there was, say, a marathon tunnelling event, starting somewhere in the streets of Athens but ending - like the athletics marathon - inside the stadium, we could be confident that the first lads out of the hole would have Donegal jerseys. Barring that, the prospect of the colours green and gold appearing together in an Olympic stadium anytime soon seems remote.