A penny for our athletes’ thoughts after Pat Hickey soap...

Perhaps something along the lines of the Pat Hickey soap story was inevitable in Brazil, where the telenovela is a TV staple.

Even those overheated soap operas would hardly have done justice to yesterday’s events: ID cards, bathrobes, passports in a press conference, the prospect of seven years’ porridge in a South American jail. We even had a political dismissal that gained the instantaneous currency of GUBU: put him back in his box, eh?

To think Hickey told this newspaper last year he was concerned at the lack of attention he was getting (“I get worried now — no one’s attacking me!” he said last May 12 months. “I really do! I wake up some days: ‘How come I’m not in the papers anymore?”).