I wish I had thought of this first, because the more I think about it the more I’m convinced the author has the right idea:

The “modern” Olympic games should be ended.

This op-ed piece, by Buzz Bissinger, appeared in the New York Times on Sunday.

He makes a compelling case that the Olympics we have come to know have outlived their usefulness, except perhaps as a platform for advertisers.

I covered 12 Olympics (six winter, six summer) and I can vouch for the diminishing returns of the event. The politics has been there throughout, the violence has come and gone (but never fully gone) and the epidemic of performance-enhancing drugs never has been brought under control.

We have another 16 days of this coming up, in August, in Beijing, where politics again will be the story, where the athletes we toast eventually could be outed as drug cheats and where jingoism and nationalism will be pervasive and unhealthy.

And don’t forget the Super Bowl-level advertising blitz.

I understand that a lot of casual sports fans like/love the Olympics for their story-telling, their ability to vault athletes from otherwise obscure sports (gymnastics, take a bow) into prominence.

But to look at the Olympics up close is to see sausage being made. At its core, it’s 99 percent marketing — of products or of countries/regions. Beijing figures to be a particularly unattractive one, giving us a host country at least as jingoistic as our own, with a repressive government that will be heavy-handed in its prosecution of the games.

It’s time for the Olympics to go away. Though it’s unlikely to happen as long as someone can still make a buck off of them.