Olympia, a city founded in western Greece, gave birth to the first Olympics in 776 B.C. Those early Olympics consisted of contests interspersed with ceremonies and sacrifices honoring Zeus, the supreme deity, and Pelops, mythical king of Olympia.

A highlight of those irreligious Olympics was that the male competitors (no females then) were usually nude in celebration of the human body. However, in 393 A.D. when Christianity became the religion of the empire, the Olympic Games were banned as a pagan festival.

Much later, in 1894, Pierre de Frdy, Baron de Coubertin, a French nobleman, established the IOC (International Olympic Committee), and held its first Olympic Games in Athens in 1896.

Currently, the Olympics has grown into one of the largest media events of the world (at Sydney in 2000 more than 16,000 journalists and broadcasters were involved). Unfortunately, the Olympics has also grown into an insatiable, ravenous, giant-sized vampire sucking money that could be spent more beneficially on food, health care, energy, etc.

A simple 776 B.C. festive pagan rite has turned into a gluttonous enterprise bloated with political infighting, drugs, violence, boycotts, egos and an aristocratic, corrupt IOC, and even death.

Logic dictates that this is not a good "bang for the buck" and that such vast sums could be spent more responsibly on the more important necessities of humankind.

Our country needs a fiscally savvy administration that can prioritize the federal budget intelligently, stop all the wasteful spending, earmarks and boondoggling, look money-sucking monsters like the Olympics squarely in the eye, and stab them straight through the heart.

What will it take? Inexperience youth, or experienced old age? Your vote in November will reveal what you think.

Harvey Thibodeau, Pinehurst