Soon the sport will start. The purpose, the reason, the point of the Olympic games will leap into action, and eyeballs from all facets of sporting fandom will be locked onto the 32 sports featured throughout the next 17 days of competition.  

This is where the rubber hits the road. The years of toil, the long months of personal sacrifice, the early mornings, late nights. The sweat, the anguish, the anxiety, the laser focus on a solitary goal all comes to a head as the world watches on.  

The individual effort and achievement of every athlete will be poured over by the crowd, the global TV market and the media, all keys to the success of the games.   

The strength of the festival is not the individual, nor the teams involved. The success of the games is within itself. The fact that this event captures the attention of the whole planet, with every nation having skin in the game, every news outlet —radio, tv, print and digital— will burst at the seams with coverage. The good, the bad, and in Canadian football, the ugly.  

This fortnight transcends sport, although it is the driver of the drama, it is a period when the world pauses. We attempt to push to one side the pain of existence, the perpetual misery of economics, politics, pestilence, disease and war and focus on the joy of competition.  

The content has been twisted and morphed over the current Olympic epoch, but the essence remains the same, nations challenging each other under the umbrella of the most significant insignificance there is, sport. It means everything in the present, but when the dust settles, the result doesn’t mean as much as the exchange itself.   

Represent Aotearoa, we’re behind you 100 percent.