Remember how we were all feeling this time four years ago, just days before the London 2012 Olympic Games were about to start? Pretty sour, actually.
Remember the G4S fiasco?
They failed to recruit enough stewards and security guards and the Army had to step in. It looked like it was going to be a right royal cock-up.
Londoners were none too pleased at their city and transport system being taken over and threatened to abandon the capital en masse.
The rest of the country had its nose out of joint because all the attention – and cash – was going to London.Again.
The cost of the event was close to £9billion and nearly every last penny of it was resented by the public.
Then we had that opening ceremony. Danny Boyle’s tour de force, a romp through the UK’s cultural and economic evolution culminating in James Bond and the Queen jumping out of a helicopter. From then on we were happy smiley people until the circus finally packed up its tent and moved on.
Will Brazil and Rio experience a similar conversion? With five days to go to its launch ceremony, the atmosphere is equally, if not more, toxic.
The corruption and poverty and general level of strife in that country are on a scale we would not recognise. And their memories of the Football World Cup in 2014 are fresh enough for them to know that all the promises of economic boost, regeneration and legacy for ordinary folk were written in chalk and washed away in the first big storm.
And this time around, we have the doping scandal.
We’ve always known about drugs in sport but until now we’ve been prepared to believe dopers are the exception.
The revelations about Russia’s doping programme have blown that out of the water. The spotlight might be on Russia but no one is fooled that this is just their problem.
Despite all that, there is every chance Rio will come good. The Games will be a welcome bit of razzmatazz in an otherwise depressing summer.
But can there really be any belief that it is a celebration of sporting endeavour?
First and foremost the Games is a humongous money-making machine.
For sponsors such as Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, for bigwigs in the sporting hierarchies, for construction firms, for private security groups like G4S and for individual star performers like Daley, Ennis-Hill, Farah, Bolt and Wiggins and whichever names burst through in Rio.
If Rio is remembered for anything, it will be the time the spirit of Chariots of Fire finally went up in flames.