All Olympic Games seem to have a news story in the background in the build-up.
It’s been forgotten about now, but even London, which turned out to be a huge success, was preceded by fears over transport and budgets.
But I can’t remember a Games that has been as troubled as Rio.
The Zika virus (and golfers’ reaction to it) would have been bad enough but Russia and its doping has taken bad publicity to a whole new low.
So, now that we’re just a week away from the opening ceremony, my big hope is that the black cloud hanging over the Olympics lifts and the actual sport starts to make the news.
I’m sure it will.
The British success stories won’t come as thick and fast as they did four years ago but there will be plenty of highlights.
As regular readers will know, I’m a paid-up member of the Jessica Ennis-Hill fan club and I can’t wait to see her go up against the young pretender Katarina Johnson-Thomson in the heptathlon.
Staying on the track, it’s fantastic to have two athletes from this part of the country to cheer on.
Laura Muir announced herself to the world with a 1,500m time the other week that would have won some Olympic finals in the past. She’s a genuine medal hope.
And the other girl from Kinross-shire, Eilidh Doyle, is one of those athletes who you feel has done everything properly in her career and really deserves an Olympic medal.
I can remember Eilidh coming on to the scene in Perth and Kinross about the same time as I was making my own breakthrough, and she’s been a great role model ever since.
Talking of role models and athletes who deserve to get a medal, I would absolutely love it if Hannah Miley got one at last.
I’ve never met anyone who has trained harder than Hannah and, in a sport where the winners seem to get younger and younger, she’s bucked the trend to stay at the top of swimming.
The pressure was on her big time four years ago when she was thought to be Britain‘s best hope for an early gold, and it maybe got to her.
This time she’ll be out of the spotlight and that will be to her advantage.
She seems to be pretty content with the career she’s had and this last Olympics will be a bonus.
You’ll not be able to get me away from the TV for a fortnight and I’m confident we’ll very soon be talking about new sporting heroes rather than drugs cheats.
* We’re getting close to full training again for our own new season, and we’ll have a new team-mate for the first part of it.
Anna Sloan is still recovering from knee surgery and Kelly Schafer (Wood as she was known over here before she got married) has agreed to join us.
Kelly has always been a curler I’ve had a lot of time and respect for and it says everything about her commitment and drive that she’s willing to come over from Canada with her son and be part of team Muirhead.
We want to get the season off to a flier and having such a good replacement for Anna as Kelly gives us a great chance of doing that.
