Although opposed to the Olympic games, Dalrymple says surely we could at least make them conform to modern standards of “fairness”:
It also occurred to me how unfair—how discriminatory—it was that only the athletic should compete in the Olympics and be eligible for medals. Could anything be better designed to undermine the self-esteem of the fat than to see a lot of finely sculpted people receiving the adulation of an enormous crowd? Should not the adulation be shared equally?
We live in a world avid for spectacle (as, of course, did the Romans). We have already extended the concept of the Games to the disabled; why not to the fat? After all, the medical journals are agreed that obesity is a medical and not a moral problem.