One of the great perks of my employment at the Boston Globe was the opportunity to cover the Olympics.

I did 11 of them, six Summer and five Winter, starting with Barcelona in 1992 and ending in London 20 years later. Being involved in the Olympics was not something on my personal radar screen when I began at the Globe. In those days we had a one-man Olympic gang named Jerry Nason. He was our Mr. Olympics and I never gave actually having an involvement with them myself a second’s thought.

It’s not that I was uninterested in them or didn’t follow them. I became aware of the phenomenon known as the Olympics as far back as 1952 with the Helsinki Games. I well remember the 1956 Games in Melbourne and the 1960 Games in Rome. I knew about the trials and tribulations of John Thomas (high jump) and Ray Norton (sprints), a pair of favorites in their events who were upset, in each case by one of those dastardly Russians.

But my Globe path did not lead me toward the Olympics until the formation of the Dream Team. I raised my hand for that one. My primary responsibilities in Barcelona were to cover both men’s and women’s basketball. There were a couple of diversions. I did a column on ex-UMass pitcher Ron Villone, a member of our baseball team, and I did a column on Ben Johnson, the disgraced Canadian sprinter from the 1988 Olympics in Seoul who was still participating in Barcelona. Let’s just say I was far kinder to one of them than I was to the other. But most of my time was spent covering basketball.

That would be most of my official working time, that is. That’s because once I got to the Olympics I was immediately hooked. I was fascinated by the world of international sport. I attended as many events, in as many different sports, as I could. With those two basketball teams as an anchor, I was able to budget my time accordingly. Every day was a new adventure.

This was the start of an Olympic career that would take me to Lillehammer, Atlanta, Nagano, Sydney, Salt Lake City, Athens, Torino, Beijing, Vancouver, and finally London, where my last official act as a full-time employee of this newspaper was to hit the “send’’ button on a column following the men’s gold-medal basketball game. To me, wrapping things up at an Olympics was perfectly appropriate. I must add that as time went on I was far from exclusive on basketball. I embraced many disciplines and became an advocate of such non-American pursuits as team handball. Some years I saw surprisingly little basketball.

I said I love the Olympics, and I do. At the same time I am troubled by them, or more specifically, by the way they have evolved. They have become bloated with too many sports, and therefore too many competitors who must be accommodated. They have become far too costly, and far too often you are left wondering where the money goes. And the management! To say the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is corrupt is to state the obvious.

For many reasons, the Winter Games have become a poison pill. It’s not far from the truth to say that no one wants them. The IOC was left with a choice for the 2022 Games between the brutal totalitarian government of Kazakhstan and a city that is not exactly known for its winter climate, and which, yes, is not exactly a model of democracy. We are being asked to swallow the notion that 2008 Summer Games host Beijing is a suitable place for the 2022 Winter Games. Really?

Let’s take a brief timeout.

By far the best of the five Winter Games sites of my experience was my first, in Lillehammer. This Norwegian town of approximately 23,000 people put on a spectacular show. The setting was idyllic, the competition was sensational, and the logistics were deftly handled. But there isn’t a snowball’s chance in you-know-where that a 23,000-population town will ever again have a chance to give us a Winter Olympics.

But it should.

Friday night the 2016 Games will begin in Rio de Janeiro and we truly have no idea what to expect. Other cities have had their doubters in the past — hello, Athens — and have come through with perfectly fine Games, but there has never before been such controversy about the viability of an Olympic site, and that includes Sochi. You know the laundry list of issues, starting with the instability of the government itself and the polluted Guanabara Bay and the transportation and the security and the etc., etc., etc.

Seven years ago, Rio seemed like a great idea for the 2016 Olympics. The first time in South America. A booming Brazilian economy. The beaches. The music. The coffee. The extraordinary enthusiasm of the sports-loving Brazilian people themselves, who, as any Olympic expert will verify, have been the best traveling fans in the world in Olympics after Olympics. It was a no-brainer.

That was then and this is now. The last thing Brazil and Rio needs in 2016 is an Olympics, or so we think. I wish them well, but I suspect current 2024 Olympic bidders Budapest, Paris, Rome and our own Los Angeles will be watching closely. I think the future of the entire Olympic movement is at stake. The Olympics could collapse under their own weight.

If that happens, we’ll be safe in saying we can blame it on Rio.

Bob Ryan’s column appears regularly in the Globe. He can be reached at ryan@globe.com.