They went too far when they started calling them ‘heroes’. Sunrise had a discussion about use of the word a while back, and it was something that I was annoyed with. Why call our athletes heroes, when the real heroes are the ones who do good things for others, saving lives, sacrificing themselves, helping out charities, etc.

Soon, this charade will die over.

When is the re-run of this?

Love to catch it to see how much of a joke it is.

So this is the Stokes of today – perfectly happy to throw millions of dollars away just to “win” against his arch enemy. The result? A bunch of very talented sportspeople that have ZERO television talent. Surely the networks have learned this by now.

I missed Steph’s TV presenting debut – despite Seven running Model twice in the space of a few hours last night – but I did get to see Libby Trickett presenting the weather on Sunrise recently, with all the skill and passion of a schoolgirl doing a speech about school spirit at morning assembly. Who knows what other swimmer delights Seven has in store for us as they try to pretend their buy-out of athletes wasn’t just a business decision made out of spite and insecurity.

Surely these supposedly experienced network execs have figured out LONG ago that no matter how good they may be at their sport, sportspeople are utterly crap at being TV presenters. Yes, there are exceptions – Mike Whitney and Mark “Jacko” Jackson did very well out of just being themselves, which is what they were hired to do. But look at the train wrecks – Ian Thorpe on Undercover Angels?? Cringeworthy television. Giann Rooney, meanwhile, seems to be a genuinely lovely woman, but give her a script and stick her in front of a camera and it’s like watching a deer being approached by a semi in slow-motion, with a bizarre Nine-presenter drawl that she doesn’t actually speak with in real life.

Stokes’ latest move was pure ego massage, but there’s a real cancer in Australian TV with the long-running theory that it’s better to launch a show by getting someone already famous to host it or present on it – regardless of the fact that their TV skills are so minimal they might as well have grabbed the first vaguely attractive person they saw in the Bourke Street Mall and put them to air. Or even, as a last resort, Ditch Davey (yes, many actors are bad at presenting too!)

Stephanie Rice probably couldn’t care less, of course – and neither would I in that position. You want to give me seven hundred grand to NOT appear on Channel Nine? Hell, I was going to pay YOU!

And from the 5 minutes of Make Me A Supermodel I got to see last night… well, let’s just say that not one of those insecure waifs stands any chance in hell of ever being referred to as a “supermodel”. They should be grateful for that. They might actually get to have lives instead.