I'll give the Olympics this much. They ain't boring!

Nobody puts the farce into sports quite like the five-ring quadrennial circus. You want lawsuits? Drug tests? Hilarity, absurdity and not-so-subtle nudity? Bad breaks, dirty dealing, choke jobs and international nose-thumbing?

Well, my friend, you have come to the right place.

OK, so maybe you think that watching the women's judo semi-finals is a touch slow. Or that it's impossible to follow a shuttlecock in motion without an 85-inch widescreen plasma display.

Fine. Forget the outcomes of the sports. Look at the process! It's the stuff that happens around them that makes the Olympics the mother lode of stories you couldn't make up if you tried.

Let's start with gymnastics. From what I can tell, the judges in this "sport" have more leeway to screw an athlete on a whim than Simon Cowell on a bad hair day. When lone Japanese judges aren't randomly telling the US Team they need to introduce unproven stunts into routines that were scored differently just months ago, you have other judges short changing the Korean guy a tenth of a point because, well, because nobody knows. Those judges have been sacked by the gymnastics federation (FIG) yet it steadfastly refuses to re-arrange anybody's gold, silver or bronze. Russian stork-queen Svetlana Khorkina lost the women's all-around to Carly Patterson and then immediately blamed the judges, saying they were biased in favor of the Americans. Oh really? Like the rest of the world is just loving us these days.

Meanwhile over at the shot-put venue, we have the Russian gold medal winner in the women's division being knocked out because she tested positive for a performance-enhancing drug. Which one? Oh, just Stanazol, the same rocket fuel they found leaking from Ben Johnson back in 1988. Talk about not being current with your "Doping News" subscription! While the rest of the track and field world is skulking around the shadows taking state of the art, stealth junk like THG, this Helga just rolls up in the 1956 Buick of steroids and gets caught.

And here's something else nobody seems to be asking: what kind of "woman" spends her life practicing the shot-put? Do these wooly mammoths have a single feminine outfit in their closet? What's a hot night out on the town for one of them? Sizzler?

On the plus side, the shot-put venue at ancient Olympia was the one place that the Greeks got finished on time -- thanks in no small part to the fact that it consists only of a large patch of dirt and two low grass mounds for spectators. A perfect place to chuck some heavy lead balls.

My favorite Olympic "sport that is definitely NOT a sport" is "air rifle." Or, as my friends and I used to call it back in the day, "B.B. Gun." Now I can understand where Olympic big wigs wouldn't want to use the phrase, "Here at the men's B.B. gun finals," because it makes it sound like little Johnny is out in the backyard plinking at cans. But seriously. When did this become Olympic-worthy?

All those years that my brother Jim and I were squirrel hunting in the backyard, could have actually been a triumphant "prelude to gold," had we simply known! We could have re-enacted an Olympic moment while shooting at our plastic army men, by pretending that we needed three straight bullseyes to beat the Bulgarian favorite.

Naturally, nobody would have even paid any attention to the B.B. gun finals, if not for the incredible mistake of an American who was rolling along to a gold inexplicably shooting the wrong target on his final shot, and thus falling to eighth place.

The wrong target! These things aren't moving, people, it ain't skeet shooting. It had to be the B.B. Gun equivalent of if Bart Starr had lined up over the guard instead of the center and false started at the goal line in the Ice Bowl. Or Jim Marshall running the wrong way for a touchdown.

Speaking of traveshamockeries, let's not even get into our USA "Dream Team" in basketball. First of all, that whole "Dream Team" moniker is coming back to haunt us now, isn't it? How many people now wish that we just called Jordan, Magic, Bird and the rest "The US Men's Basketball Team" instead? The whole "Dream Team" title works fine if it's a great team of undeniable Hall of Famers. It doesn't work so well when you have: two guys from a losing team who have yet to have a single meaningful post-season moment (Marion and Stoudamire), another guy who was a second round pick (Boozer), three NBA rookies (LeBron, Carmelo and Wade), a guy who hates practice (Iverson), a dope head (Odom), a shoot-first coach killing cancer who is now on NBA Team No. 4 in his career (Stephon Marbury), and a misfit college player with a bad back who never plays (Okefor).

"Dream Team" my ass.

But at least none of them skipped out of a drug test, and then claimed to be in a motorcycle accident that somehow put them in the hospital, but left them with not a single visible injury when they emerged (who was driving that motorcycle, John Kerry?). When it comes to embarrassing Athens moments, you have to rank sprinter Costas Kenteris and his female teammate "fleeing the interview" as Marge Gunderson said in Fargo, as one of the all-timers.

I mean, Kenteris was supposed to light the torch! Oh well, even though he's pulled out of the games, maybe he can put out the torch by dropping it from a motorcycle.

But I'll give Helios and the boys in Greece this much at least: they got the swimming pool filled with water, and there have been no (knock on wood) terrorist acts committed. In fact, maybe the Athens model for counter-terrorism is the way to go for future Olympics. If you can somehow manage to keep everyone away as the Greeks did, policing the games gets a whole lot easier.

Check everyone's bag before they enter a venue? No problem! How long does it take to look through 17 bags?