If they gave medals for embodying the Olympic spirit, the hero of the Sydney games would be a swimmer named Eric Moussambani. In the opening ceremonies, he carried the flag on behalf of the other three Olympians from Equatorial Guinea, a tiny nation split among a dot of an island and a speck on the West African mainland.

Calling Moussambani an underdog in his event, the 100-meter freestyle, is like saying that Dick Cheney could stand just a pinch more charisma. Unlike most of his competitors, who began preparing for Sydney the day after the Atlanta games ended, Moussambani’s training started only this spring.

There was no professional coach to help him, no bodybuilding programs, and no training facilities. He practiced at the largest pool in Equatorial Guinea. It is just 20 meters long. Ordinarily it serves hotel guests—mostly Western oil executives.

Among the 71 competitors in the 100 meters, Moussambani finished 71st. Yet something wondrous happened during his race—a race that would not even have occurred without his presence. There were only two other swimmers in his last-chance heat; and as it happened, both were disqualified for false starts. That left Moussambani swimming all alone, a small fish in a very big pool.

With all eyes fixed upon him, Moussambani sprinted the first 50 meters and made the turn. But he had never raced as far as 100 meters, and on the home stretch he began to tire. It took him one minute and 52 seconds to swim the length of the pool and back—64 seconds slower than the Dutch swimmer who won the gold. As he struggled to reach the end, the crowd stood and cheered in appreciation. Hearing the shouts, Moussambani said afterward, led him to think he had won a medal.

Lord knows you can lay a steaming mess of other journalistic crimes on the bean-counting heads of NBC’s programmers, but you can’t blame them for ignoring Moussambani’s story. It was slickly packaged into a two-minute segment between commercials, but it was there. It’s just that few viewers saw it, judging from the miserable TV ratings for these Olympics. And the reasons have everything to do with what makes the story so compelling; it may epitomize the Olympic ideal, but the games themselves do not.

Almost since the opening of this quadrennial showcase, the Network and Pundit Geniuses have been snatching themselves bald trying to figure out why such a relatively small number of us have bothered to tune in. After all, NBC plunked down some serious whipout (upwards of $700 million) for the U.S. broadcast rights. The Australians sank more than $5 billion into sprucing up their country for the world party. It hasn’t mattered. Americans are choosing to watch Monday Night Football, Sunday Night Football, and Saturday football over the Olympics. One reason (just a hunch here) is that it’s, um, football season. Our interest in the Games peaked somewhere in July, in the middle of Sydney’s winter.

Some observers have suggested that, while Americans have a rooting interest, they also need someone to root against. Unfortunately, we don’t have the Soviets and assorted East Bloc commies to kick us around anymore (though if you added the medals won by all of the former republics of the USSR to those earned in Sydney by the supposedly collapsed Russians, they’d still be whupping our collective hiney). Most commentators, meanwhile, have blamed the ratings debacle squarely on ratings-obsessed NBC. Faced with a time difference of 15 to 18 hours between Australia and America, the network chose to broadcast almost nothing live. Except for hermits and coma patients, it has been almost impossible to avoid learning the results before events are shown here, which in turn can make the broadcasts about as compelling as SEC football coaches’ highlight shows.

NBC has compounded the problem by turning the games into a vast wilderness of pap, a sickening soap opera laden with schmaltz, punctuated with breathless exclamations, and relying heavily on sports that involve aesthetic form and competitors in makeup. Under NBC’s misguided direction, the whole Games have a scripted feel. The main network (stepsister MSNBC has been significantly better), has devoted almost as much time to treacly features—including a couple on people who aren’t competing in Sydney—as to actual coverage. As a result, it’s as if we’re watching packaged entertainment bottle-fed to us by programmers, rather than viewing athletes controlling their own fates and making sports history. Against this backdrop, moments of genuine spontaneity, like the crowd’s reaction to Moussambani’s swim, stand out like Ayers Rock.

But they also stand out—and perhaps this is both the most significant and most disturbing reason why Americans aren’t watching the Games—because they run so counter to what we’ve come to understand the competition is all about. To the old Olympic motto, “Citius, Altius, Fortius”—faster, higher, stronger—perhaps we should add “no matter what.” Or maybe instead of the five interlocking rings, the International Olympic Committee should adopt Elvis’ TCB-over-a-lightning-bolt logo to signify that their primary goal is takin’ care of business.

We still revere the memories of 1980’s “Miracle on Ice” American amateur hockey team upsetting the Russians, and persevering if unsuccessful upstarts like the Jamaican bobsledders and Britain’s Eddie the Eagle.

But too much nowadays, memories are all they are. Now, our dominant images of the Olympics revolve around cash, corruption, glitz, and greed. Use of performance-enhancing drugs appears so rampant that any athlete who dominates or makes dramatic improvement from one year to the next is suspect. During September, Sydney has become the urinalysis capital of the world. And we can no longer content ourselves to believe that only the dirty commies cheat. Just this week, shot put champion C.J. Hunter, the husband of America’s Olympic darling Marion Jones, was busted for steroids. (Meanwhile, in a breathtaking affirmation of Emerson’s aphorism that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” the IOC stripped Romanian gymnast Andreea Raducan of a gold medal because her doctor gave her Sudafed.)

And speaking of the Committee, the most spectacular performance of all may have been turned in by Juan “El Jefé” Antonio Samaranch and his winged-monkey minions, whose achievements in graft and opulence have raised the bar for every Third World despot who dares to dream.

In these departments, the IOC’s only real rivals appear to be supplicant cities like Atlanta, Salt Lake City, and Sydney who will bear any burden, pay any bribe, and ignore any virtue in order to be chosen to host an Olympiad. It’s not a stretch to suggest that the only big decision about the Olympics based on pure principle in recent years came from the much-maligned Jimmy Carter, who opted to boycott the Moscow Games in 1980 to protest Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan. There are plenty of inspiring stories in Sydney like Eric Moussambani’s. They’re curiosities but mostly irrelevant to the corporate soul of today’s Games. The Olympics have outgrown them. And maybe, sadly, that’s why we’ve outgrown the Olympics.

How it looks from the La-Z-Boy

Titans 19, Giants 13

Auburn 20, Vanderbilt 12

Tennessee 26, LSU 16

Arkansas 21, Georgia 17

Alabama 20, South Carolina 14

Florida 27, Mississippi State 17

Kentucky 30, Ole Miss 27

Michigan 23, Wisconsin 16

Bills 20, Colts 19

Buccaneers 21, Redskins 14

Vikings 27, Lions 17

Jaguars 34, Steelers 13