BEIJING (The Times) -- There are people who are in power because they love power, and there are people who are in power because they have stuff to do. Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), seems to me to fall into the second category. He doesn't go for the grandiosity and the trappings; he doesn't insist that everybody calls him “your excellency”.

He seems to me to be something of a bullshit-free zone, which is remarkable in an environment that has encouraged more bullshit than any other organization on the planet. For example, at the Winter Games of 2002, he stayed in the athletes' village, rather than take a suite or two at a grand hotel. He has also chucked out the sports of softball and baseball, which got in as sops to American vanity, a commodity that can take an awful lot of sopping. The sports will still be contested in Beijing, but they will be gone at London in 2012.
He has tried consistently to make the Games simpler, to emphasize the notions of competition and sport, at the expense of excess and wild nationalism. He wants the Games to become more affordable for the countries that stage them. When the pro-Tibetan demonstrations disrupted the torch relay, instead of going on about love and peace, he said: “You should not look on the International Olympic Committee to solve the world's problems.” In other words: this is sport, for God's sake, not a United Nations peace initiative. Rogge consistently comes across as a man who prefers sport to bullshit, in other words. How the hell did he ever get to be boss of the IOC?
I caught up with Rogge at a gig set up by Omega, which does the timing at the Olympic Games. There were handshakes, high-ups from the Swiss hideout of the watchmakers, a couple of real Olympians (Alexander Popov and Ian Thorpe, not bad examples), a ritual exchange of freebies, a rather jolly chap from the Beijing Olympic organizing committee, speeches, an interpreter on tottering heels and an awfully pretty girl in a white frock. Nobody I asked knew who she was, but if she is a film star, I want all her films.
Now this is the sort of gig in which bullshit is almost de rigueur. My dear friends, we are all here together to work in harmony for the future of the planet; you know the sort of thing that's required. So I was curious to see how far Rogge would give himself away, whether or not the inner bullshitter would make himself plain.
Not a bit of it. Instead, he gave us a brief philosophical essay about time and its relationship to sport. “The legends of sport are built upon time,” he said. He gestured to Thorpe and Popov: “For them, one hundredth of a second represents hours and hours of training.”
It's an intriguing thought: how much training does it cost to save a tiny fragment of time when it matters? Hour after hour after hour, just to save yourself an eye-blink; such a thought encapsulates all the grandeur and preposterousness of modern sport. All measured in the unforgiving ticks and tocks of the timekeepers.
Rogge then expanded the thought to take in the sweep of time from era to era, and my eyes strayed to a picture of Florence Griffith-Joyner, the unforgettable Flo-Jo, from another era, another time; and her records, her best times, measured in their seconds, still stand today. No one has beaten her, perhaps a tribute to the changing eras, she never failed a drugs test, and even after her untimely death nothing was proved, but few doubt that she was loaded to the eyeballs on every go-faster juice the world could make.
Time matters in sport, bullshit doesn't. That's always been my view, rather refreshing to find it duplicated by the man in charge. I'm rather keen to see some sport myself, and after the usual bullshit of the opening ceremony, real sport is what we'll get. Right here, some time most awfully soon, athletes will be seeking to fill the unforgiving hundredth and do something that will be remembered for years.
Regrets? Ian Thorpe has a few but too few to mention
Ian Thorpe won five Olympic gold medals for Australia; you remember the Thorpedo. Shaking hands with him was like clasping the flipper of a seal, there seemed to be far too much hand wrapped around mine. The famous feet were covered in what looked like size 19 snakeskin brogues; if so, an awful lot of snakes died to make those rear fins look so elegant.
I have always thought Thorpe was a man of style and substance and I was alarmed to find myself pretty well right. There are some people in sport you take a shine to and you find, however illogically, that you want them to be more than just supremely effective athletes.
He is here doing some stuff for the sponsors, which is fair enough, but he is also involved in the establishment of green industries in China. He spoke with easy eloquence about the need for such things. He has a lot of involvement in China and Japan, a logical extension of thought for an Australian who also lives on the Pacific rim. “There is a real will in this country to improve environmental standards,” he said.
It is hard to understand why he retired at 23; the assumption was that he simply got sick of training, of spending all his time in a pool. Not so. He still swims. He finds that a swim, even for 15 minutes, is the perfect de-stresser for a man whose life now revolves around business and television. No, the real reason he quit was because when he stopped swimming for an injury, the sudden revelation of new possibilities in his life was overwhelming. “Stopping swimming was the most exciting thing in my life - after starting swimming.”
For many athletes, retirement is a devastation, a kind of death. For Thorpe, it seems to have been the reverse. All the same, won't there be little voices in your head telling you that you should be out there, telling you that you could beat Michael Phelps? After all, he did it four years ago in Athens; as perfect a bit of sport as I've seen.
A pause, and then one of those moments when all masks drop: the acknowledgement of a palpable hit. He couldn't quite make himself say no: “Ah, there are always little voices in your head ...”
Time waits for no man unless you are a former skier
Meanwhile, one of the people from Omega, the sponsor, was talking about pre-digital timekeeping. At the downhill skiing, you can't see the start and the finish at the same time. So the time - as in what o'clock - a competitor set off was noted, and someone else wrote down the time he went through the finish.
As every fifth competitor left, the start times were stuffed into his pocket, for delivery to the timekeepers at the bottom. Several hours after competition, by which time a wise competitor was already deep into the après-ski, you found out whether you'd won or come last.
Competition is much plainer these days, in all sports, and, do you know what, with each layer of confusion that technology removes, a further layer of human complexity is revealed. That's why some of us keep coming back to sport again and again. Time after time.
Simon Barnes is the multi-award-winning chief sportswriter at The Times.