Friday, February 14, 2025
HomeFeatureNew Olympic stadium a bit like grandpa's sinister chocolate

New Olympic stadium a bit like grandpa’s sinister chocolate

Creating the old silk purse out of a sow’s ear, as the saying goes, isn’t new.

And Logan City Council needs to be paid its due for shaming its higher state and federal authorities into paying for our new “Olympic” stadium.

They’ll no doubt find an Olympian to open it, and it may indeed be a training ground for future national athletes.

It’s like the chocolate grandpa gave us as kids to keep quiet about the flask he kept down the side of his lounge chair.

“When they start talking about grandpa being sober for 20 years, just smile and nod, kids,” he’d say.

Speaking of which – and no, I’d only been sober since the night before – I went into a cafe the other day and ordered a glass of orange juice.

It came in a jam jar with a handle. To me, that wasn’t a “glass” of orange juice because a traditional glass would have allowed me to purse my lips upon its sides and sip.

Wanda says I’m rattling on about semantics. But this is important. It’s made of glass, however it is not “a” glass.

The jar they’d given me had edges designed for a screw-on lid and at my age, there was high risk of orange juice making its way down the side of my face onto the floor.

This made me compelled to use the paper straw they’d so kindly supplied.

These days I get rather excited by a jar of juice and produce an enthusiastic amount of saliva which gets caught on the paper straw, causing it to wilt.

So here I am after 15 minutes, left with a half-sucked straw which no longer has a tunnel through which to draw a mouthful of liquid, and half a jar of orange juice.

You see, it would have been so much easier for the cafe owner to forget the novelty, and to pour the orange juice into a glass of traditional nature.

The jar looked nice, as I’m sure a brand new stadium will.

But we’ll know that this wasn’t actually built for the Olympics.

That’ll be despite the flashing lights brandishing its name, albeit likely without the Olympic rings because they’re tied up in delicate copyright law which dictates that to be an official venue you actually did have to host an event.

Like grandpa, the mayor and those who chipped in for our fine new facility will spruik ad nauseum that this is “our” Olympic stadium – built for us when the Olympics came to town in 2032.

Well, not necessarily “our” town. Because when the mayor way back then jumped up and down in 2023, letting them all know that it was farcical every other city in the region got to host something – even if it was only the damn marbles, or a basketball match, or whatever – nobody listened.

Instead, they told him to take his chocolate and shut his potty mouth.

Meanwhile, and please keep up with the analogy here folks, grandpa (aka Aunty Queen P) kept sipping her glass of glory that was never rightfully hers in the first place.

In fact, there’s every possibility that Olympians of the 2032 Brisbane regional Games won’t ever step foot in the place.

The Claytons Olympic Stadium – the one you have when you don’t have an event – will be ours, but we’ll never really feel entitled to it.

Sure, it’s a little embarrassing that we got a big new building under false pretences. But who cares? 

If we all do the right thing and let it go, our grandchildren will all be doing triple somersaults, shooting baskets, butting shuttlecocks, or whatever it is they do in the nicest building in town.

And therein lies the point. However it happened, we got a stadium to keep us quiet and like grandpa in his recliner, all those responsible for the legacy retain the credit.

Everybody wins.

Hey Wanda, we got any of that Old Gold still sitting in the cupboard?

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