where all the money went out the back door without so much as a sausage

Would be freeloaders,

I'm calling it.
As The Games draw to a close, there must surely be a Royal Commission into what went wrong and where all the money went.
Tom Hughes QC, Counsel Assisting and Kitty Chiller as the star witness.
She'll be endlessly cross-examined about the wildly over-optimistic predictions on where Straya finished on the all-important Medal Tally.
"I put it too you, Ms Chiller, that Australia is a small fish in a very big pond, and yet, after over a century of trying to grow into a nice plate-sized one, and the vast amount of treasure spent in the pursuit, Australians still don't get it. Do you agree with that proposition?"
"Yes"
"In that case, do you believe Australia was - to use the vernacular -'punching above its weight' at the recent Games in Rio?"
"No"
That sort of thing.
Oh, did I mention money?
Forget Citius, Altius, Fortius.
As a news reporter covering Sydney 2000, I saw first hand and up close the astonishing graft, greed, corruption, magnificent riches wasted, and the exceptionally lavish fully-funded lifestyles enjoyed, maintained, and closely guarded by the 98 Members of the IOC.
In 2000, they ate their way through Australia's entire annual production of saffron in a fortnight.
The Gravy Train to end all gravy train's.
They think and live like they are royalty, entitled to endless entitlement [you only stop being an IOC Member on the day you die], and behave as if the sun shines out of their collective dirty arseholes, while everyone around them bows & scrapes.
So they are first class role models, always have been, when it comes to frittering away mountains of cash, no cheques please.
The Australian Sports Comission freely admits that we, that is, you and me, have spent no less than $376.7 MILLION on "high-performance" Olympic sports programs since London.
That's a helluva lot of pineapples thrown at it, with barely a brass razoo to show for it.
The Royal Commission will be onto the fact that the "amateur" athletes themselves saw very little of the brown paper bags stuffed with greenbacks.
They'll be imagining a scenario where all the coaches, trainers, physio's, witch-doctors, nurses, orthopaedic surgeons, massuers, cupping experts, sports psychologists & trick cyclists, performance algorithm crunchers, dieticians, acupuncturists, not to mention drug-peddlars, and the myriad of other hangers-on with grand titles, getting together in a meeting room somwhere in Canberra, and the Chairman saying to the meeting "now, we've got all this free money from the Government, so what should we do with it? Do we spend it on sets and costumes? Or pay ourselves handsomely?"
To which comes the deafening reply "PAY OURSELVES HANDSOMELY!!"

My Spy at The Ground in Rio, while fond of the non-Olympic sports of real football and cricket, is also a basketball nut and was scathing in his opinion of the sheer arrogance of the Opals [who were meant to have a saloon passage through to the gold medal match v USA, weren't they?], but, who like almost all of the other team sports' Strayan teams, went out in the quarter-finals or worse [in the "professional" as buggery Opals case, to Serbia. WTF?] and thus get shoved out the back door and sent home without so much as a sausage.
I have barely seen a frame of the yachting on the Ch7 coverage, but it is the sailor boys and girls who can always be relied upon to bring home the bacon late in the second week, to make the scoreboard look barely respectable.
Go figure.
Think Sydney.
I could go on, but I'll let the Bush Telegraph in the corner of the loungeroom do the talkin', for once:

*The too precious - Golfers and Tennis players who are too good to even go to the Games.
*The reckless idiots - Judo players who forget to build an attack on substance.
*The sugar-loaded dreamers - Rowers who turn up on a wild card and want us to believe they’re ready.
*The over-confident - with beliefs built on hope not results - Soccer players who believe miracles happen twice within one minute of each other.
*The spoilt brats – gymnasts and divers who have always been told they’re wonderful and Mummy gives them a 10 every time.
*The get rich quick mob – the whole damn lot of ‘em living it up on the sweat of workers without a care or threat of punishment when they fail.

My Spy is cynical & cranky, but has plenty of respect for the long-suffering taxpayer, with good reason.
It's been such fun and it aint over yet, but I'm through with commentary on these Games - the best ever, as they always are - same, same, only different - sayōnara Rio de Janiero.
I'll be seeing you all in Tokyo in 2020, where you'll find me heading straight out to the skateboard park.
And as always, remember that if you are not enjoying yourself, then it's probably your own fault.
Tally Ho!
Toot! Toot!