Gotta admit the 2012 London Summer Games got off to a disappointing start for me when I learned the grassy knoll in the opening ceremonies was only temporary. My dream of cheese rolling becoming an Olympic event will have to wait yet another four years.

I’m not kidding. What makes trampolining or badminton more worthy of Olympic status than humans hurtling down a hill chasing after a wheel of cheese? It certainly isn’t entertainment value or star power.

The Olympics exists for the arcane and unsung. For four years, the vast majority of the sports are ignored but for two weeks of international television exposure. The vast majority of the athletes toil in anonymity for their entire lives for a few days in the spotlight.

Exposure opens the door to ridicule from some corners, but I doubt some Turkish trampolinist cares whether a columnist from a small Maine newspaper or even the New York Times deems them worthy. And they probably don’t care if you’re at home reaching for the remote to find USA-France men’s basketball on another channel.

This is why the Olympics is still relevant. Despite all of the politics, corruption, hypocrisy and cynicism surrounding it, it can still sell the ideal to its participants. The participants, regardless of their motivations, can sell it to the rest of the world.

The rest of us have sufficient cause not to buy it, of course. The athletes are far from perfect. They are as guilty of sullying the ideal as the bureaucrats who get rich off their sweat. Many of them arrived in London with syringes, pills and creams in their luggage and will never in a million years live up to the standards set by Jesse Owens or whoever your Olympic hero is.

Some of us tend to have tunnel vision when we reflect upon those heroes. We forget that they had their own faults. We want to believe that they were immersed in the Olympic ideal, that the Games and everyone associated with them were altruistic, earnest and authentic. It leads to disenchantment which, for some, leads to disinterest.

Those who choose to ignore the Olympics now for these reasons are missing the bigger point. We live in a world full of contradictions, full of cheaters, loaded with people motivated by greed. We always have. We can’t escape it regardless of the meaningless sports we follow or the worthwhile causes to which we pledge ourselves.

Part of the pleasure of watching the Olympics is separating the wheat from the chaff. It isn’t easy, and the media is only about 1/10th as helpful as it could be.

One of the most unbearable parts of the Olympic viewing experience is having to sit through the network coverage (I’d pinpoint NBC, but CBS and ABC were guilty of the same sins when they covered the Olympics). It’s bound to be better this year because at least we have options with all of the cable coverage and internet streaming. But we are still hostages of the whims of network executives.

Consider that during the opening ceremonies, NBC pre-empted a solemn remembrance for the 52 victims of the July 7, 2005 terrorist attack in London shortly after the city was awarded the 2012 Games. While the rest of the world witnessed one of the most touching moments of the evening, NBC aired a pointless Ryan Seacrest interview with Michael Phelps instead.

For the next two weeks, we will get treacly human interest features about the athletes. Many of them will have compelling stories to tell, but NBC will turn all of them into Lifetime mini-movie melodrama. Some of them will be completely manufactured to get the big names more face time. I’m anticipating a tearful LeBron James confessing to Mary Carillo that his receding hairline cost him a Pantene Pro-V endorsement deal by Thursday.

But the savvy Olympic viewer can still wade through it all and find the occasional gold mine, sometimes in the most unexpected places.

The highlight of Day 1 wasn’t the disappointing Michael Phelps/Ryan Lochte duel (which NBC kept everyone from seeing live on TV, incidentally), but the team archery final between Italy and the United States.

Italy won by a point on the final shot, a bull’s-eye, for it’s first medal ever in the event. The climax had all the drama a viewer could want.

Yeah, I know I won’t watch archery again until my wife rents “The Hunger Games.” And maybe the Italian team will test positive for PED’s (Has the IOC banned beta-carotene?).

I don’t care. It was extremely entertaining (well, at least the last half-hour that I watched. That’s another great thing about the Olympics now, event surfing). It was also very cool to see these anonymous archers, presumably among the best of the best, competing as if their lives were on the line in front of the whole world while knowing they will have to find real jobs in two weeks.

It was an early and much-needed reminder that we can still celebrate competition and excellence, even though the network is breaking away from the action every five minutes to beg us to watch its new mediocre sitcom this fall and some bureaucrat is counting their cash in their London penthouse.

The Olympics still has everything it always had, good and bad.

All that’s missing is a rolling wheel of cheese.