Let’s turn our minds to the most important aspect of Brisbane Olympics 2032: the mascot

The 1982 Brisbane Commonwealth Games’ mascot, Matilda the kangaroo, glides around the track at the opening ceremony at QEII stadium. Picture: News Corp

We may be in the middle of a pandemic with more than half of the nation’s population under the doona, but it is time to rouse and turn our minds to important things – the 2032 Olympic mascot.

To be honest, Olympic mascots have not always been the stuff of inspiration.

The first Olympic mascot was knocked out for the Grenoble Winter Olympics in 1968. The mascot bore the onomatopoeic name for those silly enough to shuffle about in snow. Schluss was Grenoble’s animated masterstroke in what appeared to be a macroscopic spermatozoon on skis. But that’s the French for you. Sex, sex, sex.

Schuss was the Winter Olympics’ first unnoficial mascot, introduced in Grenoble, France, in 1968. Picture: Twitter

It’s been a rough ride ever since with the nadir coming at the Athens Summer Olympics in 2004 where Ancient Greek dolls, Athenos and Phovos headlined the games. The two (a third, Proteas, was introduced for the Paralympics in the same year) were said to be a link between ancient Greece and modern Greece.

Perhaps it was the primary school level illustrations that caused all the problems. Whatever it was, the arrival of the anthropomorphic quasi-creatures led to a petition and a lawsuit from angry Athenians.

The petition in part read, “The previously mentioned de facto situation deeply and brutally offends our honour and esteem as Greek citizens who participate and commune with Greek culture in all its expressions, and causes us sadness and deep mental anguish.”

The anguish continued, “Mocking the spiritual values of the Hellenic Civilization by degrading these same holy personalities that were revered during the ancient Olympic Games. For these reasons we have proceeded to legal action demanding the punishment of those responsible.”

Athena, right, and Phevos, left, the mascots for the Athens 2004 Olympics are projected on a video wall with the ancient Parthenon behind them. Picture: AP

It’s hard to know what happened to the legal action but the games village in Athens turned into a windswept and only vaguely interesting crack den during the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and by then I guess, Athenians had more pressing concerns.

Roy Slaven, left, and Greg Pickhaver from Channel 7 show, The Dream, with the Athens Olympic mascots. Picture: News Corp

A collection of weird, badly drawn cartoon images is not going to cut it in 2032. Let’s not forget, cartoon art has been all downhill since Chuck Jones and Friz Freling left us.

Moreover, the business of cartoon imagery leads in that tiresome Disney fashion, to costumes of humanoid figures that actual humans are press ganged into wearing for minimum wage.

By way of cautionary tale, this reminds me of a particularly unpleasant incident at the Sydney Royal Agricultural Show many years ago when the event was still held at Moore Park.

An old drinking buddy who was roughly attached to the arts community and thus obliged to seek casual employment wherever he could find it, found himself one day heavily in wine on the back of a truck after heaving himself into the Paddle Pop Lion costume.

He wasn’t a high functioning alcoholic, more a function at a basic level alcoholic in terms of respiration and sitting down.

Standing up held more challenges and as the truck lurched into motion to join the Grand Parade, our Paddle Pop Lion took a tumble off the back of the flat bed and commenced a long body roll before coming to rest on the spoon drain around the perimeter of the grounds.

To this day those kids present, all grown up now, can’t eat a banana Paddle Pop without bursting into tears.

Any thought that Brisbane 2032 should feature a small army of costumed drunks should be dismissed in the interests of the mental health of both the observer and the wearer.

I have news, people. Good news. Matilda, the 13 metre tall, six tonne fibreglass kangaroo that graced the 1982 Brisbane Commonwealth Games is available. Its current home is a truck stop, petrol station and takeaway restaurant at a servo in Kybong just off the Bruce Highway where it has stood for the past 10 years.

Matilda the 1982 Commonwealth Games mascot now resides at a petrol station in #Kybong#Queenslandpic.twitter.com/IFRyHAOQb1

— australian kitsch 🦘 (@OzKitsch) August 30, 2016

Sure, it’s got a bit of mould around the pouch that had once opened to liberate 20 children incarcerated in a fibreglass hell in front of a grateful crowd at QSAC stadium to perform a trampoline display during the opening ceremony.

Just as an aside, a fresh-faced young journalist by the name of Andrew Bolt covered the action from within the belly of the beast. Bolt reported that Boris Kosanovic, in charge of Matilda’s head was on the moselle at the time but maintained an acute sense of comic timing in terms of calibrating Matilda’s head swivel while another fellow, Danny Baxter, enchanted the big crowd by performing the wink presumably by a complex system of pulleys and levers.

Play it again, I say. What’s the French for encore? Play on all the way to 2032. What better way of telling the world of our great national obsession with constructing gigantic fibreglass representations of the things we love and love to eat?

Matilda’s renaissance might even be prefaced by a reality TV program where all of Australia’s gigantic fibreglass animal creations assemble in the Big Brother household and the whiff of romance between the Daintree’s Big Barra and Goulburn’s Big Merino keeps the punters coming back for more. Vive la difference. Vive l’amour. Patent pending. All rights reserved.

But back to the Olympics and Matilda. In these days of Olympic parsimony, of thrift and the rejection of ostentation, we could pick Matilda up on Gumtree, haggle the owners down to forty five bucks, postage and handling not included.

So, that’s that. Now all that’s left is for Brisbane to undertake a mad and wholly unnecessary construction of infrastructure that will be swollen with concrete cancer within a decade only to be smashed to pieces with a wrecking ball to finally end the embarrassment.

Did someone say mass transit funicular? Right. Let’s get to work.