One contest I'm glad we lost

Whewww!

Thank Zeus we're not getting the Olympics.

To start with, in the wake of the awful London subway and bus bombings, we don't need to draw another terrorism bull's-eye on this city. We don't need another symbol to attract barbarous fanatics who are willing to kill and maim to make political statements on an international stage.

Don't think the name WORLD Trade Center was lost on Al Qaeda.

The last time NYC had a major event like this was the Republican National Convention and it was Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly's least fine hour, as he had his cops lock down the streets of the city, cordon off our terminals, treat the entire city like one big perp walk and arrest hundreds of perfectly innocent people and cage them in sweltering pens without toilets or water just to prove that we can run a safe city.

We don't need the RNC Convention times 10 in our great and open city.

Sure, the Olympics would've brought revenue to the city. But the city already seems to be generating tons of that with a secret tax of sanitation tickets, extra meter maids and by giving the underpaid police a raise by dealing from the bottom of the deck and paying incoming rookies a disgraceful $25,000 a year.

So, if we're that strapped, why attract more bad guys, which is what the Olympics will bring?

I was never in favor of bringing the Olympics to New York City. I've always felt we have enough homegrown dope fiends so that we don't need to invite the fastest, strongest and highest jumping dopers in the universe to the Big Apple. Our cops, who do an overall excellent job, have a hard enough time chasing wiry junkies without having to chase gold-medalists on performance enhancing drugs.

And we also have plenty of masterful crooks and swindlers already working every angle in the city. We have legions of corrupt politicians so that we don't need to do an international job search to bring the Olympic Bribe-taking Organizing Committee to town like a traveling Tammany Hall Show.

And, hey, if we want to see dirty judges like the ones who've been caught fixing events in the past few Olympics, all we need to do is sprint to Brooklyn Supreme Court and catch the latest Judge-On-The-Take trial. In fact, we should give out gold, silver and bronze medals for Most Corrupt Judges in New York.

And if it's child abuse you're interested in, which is what Olympic gymnastics truly is, we can open the files at Administration for Children's Services and parade out a cavalcade of starvations, corporal punishment and neglect.

So we really don't need Olympic gymnastics events where beautiful little girls are turned into human bonzai trees by gym-Nazi trainers so that they can bounce around like Spaldeens for the entertainment of adults, after suffering months of gerbil food and grueling hours in the gym to maintain 80 pounds of weight.

Most of these kids never grow tall enough in adulthood to qualify to ride the Cyclone down Coney.

You crave mismatches like NBA stars trouncing amateur basketball players from the Philippines? No sweat, we already have Bloomberg vs. Ferrer.

Now that the West Side stadium and the Olympics are dead, perhaps Mike Bloomberg and Kelly can focus on continuing their Olympian job of running a safe and prosperous city, which they've done with gold medal performances.

In the wake of the London bombings, they might focus on the one place where crime is up in this city - in the subways, where it has spiked 17%. There is no way to deny this has happened while we are shutting down token booths, a truly stupid idea. Maybe we should learn from London's tragedy and place a seasoned cop in every one of those empty booths. Maybe working in tandem with a speedy rookie cop pounding a beat on the station.

Seasoned cops have itchy noses for dirty suspects. We have to stop these lunatics at the turnstiles. This is the kind of teamwork we need most in our city.

The bombs that went off in London on Thursday morning came the day after London won the right to host the Olympics. And they might be just a dress rehearsal. They also prove that President Bush's rote justification for the war in Iraq "we fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here" is idiocy. Ask London. Ask Madrid.

So I think we should count our blessings that New York didn't get the Olympics. New York doesn't need the headaches - the closed streets, the sealed terminals, the bomb-sniffing dogs, the police roundups, and the imported corruption, dope addicts and political theater that the Olympics would have brought.

We're New York City. We're already the best city in the world.

Whewww....