I GLANCED UP at the TV a few days ago just in time to catch a glimpse of what looked like a bit of equipment from a Georgia chain gang go sailing across the screen. That was followed a few minutes later by the sight of someone getting a sharp boot in the funny bits, then a set of rictus grins hove into watery view.

It was deep into Dracula time and I had dozed off into a nightmare, appropriately enough, of quarter-ton portions of pre-tinned cat food prancing about in an arena. What I had awakened to were still the Olympic games, except they had moved on from horses pawing the turf to even more arcane examples of modern sport.

The clock read about 1 a.m., which made it either 11 in the morning or 3 in the afternoon in Sydney. (I've never quite gotten a handle on this time difference thingie, which is why I once arrived at Tahiti's intriguingly named Faaa airport 25 hours before my scheduled flight for San Francisco.)

Anyway, that's an hour made for deep thinking, such as how do we know there are black holes if we can't see them, why does Britain issue cut-price TV licenses for the blind, and how did the Olympic Games get from marathon running in 776 BC to synchronized diving (or "Les Plongeons Synchronises," as the French would have it) today?

I was pondering the Olympic slogan, "citius, altius, fortius" ("swifter, higher, stronger") when this British girl on the screen delivered a solid boot to the crotch of her opponent. Back in dear auld 776 BC, the men did their Olympic thing in the altogether. At this moment I thought of them, and my eyes watered.

The event this girl was participating in was taekwando, a martial art invented by the Koreans for turning the most sensitive parts of the human anatomy into purple mush streaked with little bits of yellow and orange. The participants are clothed in protective gear, but I still fail to see how delivering a citius kick up the kazoo qualifies as sport.

Nor, for that matter, do I see the point of synchronized swimming, which seems to me more like synchronized smiling, except that I've seen more attractive smiles on strychnine victims down at Knoxville's city morgue. The glamour aspect also doesn't get much of an assist from the clips that the girls wear on their noses.

I had to switch it off. The hour was very late, and as fellow journalist Martin Johnson put it, synchronized swimming/smiling "is a sport/pastime that traditionally sends non-devotees into a deeper coma than Rip van Winkle." And I am, indeed, a devoted non-devotee.

Ditto for her/its sister newcomer to the Olympic sporting rings, synchronized diving, which involves men sporting identical haircuts and wearing identical swim trunks leaping off the three-meter and performing jacknives and twists and for all I know, triple toe pirouettes and waves and kisses to mama in the audience, all in sync.

The pair of British entries in this one cut a fascinating figure even before they got a single tootsie damp. They had haircuts that, as one baffled observer put it, "looked like the product of a visit to an inebriated sheep shearer."

I'll refrain from any comments on beach volleyball, another of the nouveau Olympiques activities. They may not be able to get me for what I'm thinking, but I could do two to 10 years for prurience beyond the pale if I put it down in print.

It isn't only the new sports that have me baffled. As I reached for the matchsticks to prop my eyelids open, I happened on the hammer throw. Except what they are throwing doesn't look anything like a hammer. It looks like the ball and chain that they used to clamp on your legs in a slammer Down South for trying to train your wife as an Olympic 30-minute underwater swimmer.

Not only does the hammer throw look odd, it looks downright dangerous. The thrower grabs hold of the thing by some sort of D-ring, whirls around three or four times, then lets fly. How does he or she know where it is headed? Are there added points for not caring?

As I say, I'm not terribly awake at this time of night, and suddenly I have great visions of this bloody ball and chain coming down somewhere up in Section H of the Olympic Stadium and clobbering the synchronized diver's mom, or maybe landing squarely in the middle of the Japanese synchronized swimmers' very neat human star effect.

So what next? For the Athens Olympics in 2004 will we get synchronized pot-smoking? Javelin catching? They're already pondering ballroom dancing, so how about limbo dancing under a 10,000-volt electric wire, or alfresco belly dancing? How about caber tossing (that's a sort of Scottish telephone pole without the wires)?

For all the pageantry, the Olympics have long been a haven for some folk who would be better off in a home for the bewildered. There was the Czech three-day equestrian team that managed to chalk up 18,952 penalty points in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The main problem was one of the riders, Lieutenant Otomar Bures.

Bures personally accounted for 18,130 of the penalty points by taking two hours 45 minutes to complete a 17 3/4-minute stretch, then fell off his horse and had to chase it around the course.

And there was an Italian waiter named Dorando Pietri, who staggered into London's White City Stadium leading the marathon runners in the 1908 Olympics. He collapsed, but it wasn't from exhaustion. It was from all the Chianti that he used to drown his thirst along the 26-mile route.

As I slipped back into slumber in front of the TV set, I thought of this, my favorite sports event. Each April I eagerly await the start of the London Marathon, drinks to hand. Then for the next three hours, I happily sit propped on pillows in bed, sipping coffee and chomping doughnuts, watching the thousands as they pound and pass out on 26 miles 385 yards of London's streets.

The Germans have a phrase for it - schadenfreude. It roughly translates as: "Rejoicing in someone else's misery."

Thought for the Week: When everything seems to be coming your way, you're probably in the wrong lane going the wrong way.

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