Chris Rattue: Ad row an ugly blot on Games

Just when you thought it was safe to pop your head up and start to take in the 2006 sporting landscape, along comes athletics ...

Yes. Athletics. And the Games haven't even begun.

Excuse the yawn, but the ding dong between the New Zealand Olympic Committee and three of our best athletes lacked a certain x-factor.

Yawn ... or cringe.

The good news is that the first argument about how much personal advertising the athletes can undertake during the Commonwealth Games period has been resolved. And not before time. The bad news is there are vague predictions of more to follow. Can't wait, although I for one am not expecting any more of this trouble.

It hasn't been a pretty sight, as our famous few squabbled in the street over a few dollars.

When such a spat involves the Commonwealth Games - a rare relic where camaraderie isn't completely buried by the pursuit of fame and fortune - it becomes more painful to watch than a Clive Woodward press conference.

Arguments over who gets to advertise what, when, and with who might get the adrenaline going in the halls of power, and hold understandable interest among the athletes.

For sure, this was an important issue. It often is for less fortunate New Zealand sports and sports people, eking out a living.

Times are usually tough if you're not a professional rugby player, and even some of the rugby mob aren't exactly rolling in it.

The evidence of financial strain is everywhere.

I've always presumed, for instance, that Olympic champions Sarah Ulmer and Hamish Carter - two of the athletes in this latest row - only agreed to represent a world-wide burger flipper because they had hit skid row.

Why else would two fit and athletically successful people help push fat, refined carbohydrate and salt-laden nutritional disasters upon our youngsters?

This latest money scramble involving Olympic champions Carter and Ulmer plus Athens silver medallist Bevan Docherty just HAD to be resolved in a satisfactory way.

The spectre, even if it was remote, of our world-class athletes being cut from the Commonwealth Games team was hardly a heartening start to the year.

But the NZOC tells us there could be more in store. Sort it out troops, like the sensible adults we presume you to be, before the vision of rampant egos and dollar signs drives us all away.

As Docherty quite rightly declared about this case: "There are two very good cases to the one story."

More importantly though, he wisely used the word "compromise".

There are indeed two very good sides to this argument, but unfortunately there has been a lack of two very good sides to quickly sort it out.

The sight of advertising commitments cutting so deeply into what might be left of the sporting spirit, that even something as low rent as picking a Commonwealth Games team involves a money squabble, is not a pretty one.

The Commonwealth Games are, hopefully, a happy little deal bringing together people from diverse parts of the world in friendship and healthy competition, with sacrifice paramount in the pursuit of wholesome ideals.

Who is that bloke kidding, you might say.

Yet there isn't much point to a sporting competition like this, based on increasingly meaningless historical ties, if it doesn't stand for something beyond pure self interest.

The Commonwealth Games even dare to suggest that to run, jump or throw has meaning in itself, that filling the lungs through healthy exercise can benefit the body and mind with no ulterior motive. Also, that ordinary people can do extraordinary things.

Oh dear. Got all misty eyed and carried away there.

Still, even with a cynical eye, it was hard to imagine that Ulmer, Carter and Docherty might have one day sat grandkids on the knee to recount how they'd missed this sporting festival for something as trivial as selling cars on TV. And are there really any other athletes out there who would even contemplate this outcome? Surely not.