Every four years, smarmy sportswriters and snarky social critics across the planet prepare for several weeks of condescending columns criticizing the globe’s most-anticipated sporting event — the World Cup — err, I mean the Olympics (only smarmy AMERICAN sportswriters actually criticize the World Cup).

The call for reform in these millennium-old games are as prominent as the Nike swoosh is on every athletes shoe.

It’s too corporate.

It’s too political.

Athletes are simply used as billboards to promote Third World exploitists like Nike, Adidas and McDonald’s.

There is no such thing as an amateur anymore and wouldn’t it be better if no one competed for their country, only for themselves, seems to be the cry of the hyper-intellectuals cascading down from the ultra-modern rafters of the Beijing Water Cube.

Well — they are wrong.

The Olympics does have its shortcomings and they are painfully evident.

I’ll be the first to admit one can see Kobe Bryant tussle with Pau Gasol on any Thursday afternoon in the Staple Center’s practice facility. I’ll stipulate that neither shooting air rifles nor ballroom dancing are really sports. And don’t worry, Michael Phelps will be compensated for every stroke he takes in his quest to become the next Mark Spitz. In fact, comparing Phelps and Spitz is a little silly. Phelps has been scanned by more hi-tech computers and cameras than Ali Abdul’s luggage on an El Al flight out of Jerusalem, while Spitz simply trained by jumping in a cold-water quarry outside of Bloomington.

That’s not the point.

The fact that Kobe and Gasol will be wearing the jerseys of their nations is what makes the difference.

You might say I take a “tribal-tailgating attitude” to the Summer Games and there is plenty of room for the American beach volleyball tandem of Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh in my teepee.

During the Olympics, we support the home team with same fervor that fills the Hatchet House, Assembly Hall or Lucas Oil Stadium. We have a need to connect with something greater than ourselves. When France says that they will “smash America” in the 4X100 freestyle swim, then every red, white and blue-stated American takes it personally.

Yes, politics are always in the backdrop and often in the forefront of every Olympics, but that is one of the ways we mark the passage our lives. From Jesse Owens in 1936 to John Carlos in 1968, both showed how passive and aggressive protest helped force equality into every living room. From the Black September massacre in Munich to the Atlanta bombing, we watched radical agendas, coupled with violence, destroyed the games’ innocence. The boycotts of 1980 and 1984 may have been the most petty gestures of the entire Cold War, but still couldn’t kill off what we love about the games.

The Olympics are about the balance between nationalism and an individual’s relationship to it, us and themselves. That is very different from just politics or personal agendas.