Spanish TV show Elite garnered many fans for the way each season based itself around a whodunnit murder mystery, all while probing dynamics of gender, class, race and sexuality with a cast of impossibly good-looking high school students. Olympo transplants the action — with many of the same actors who starred in later seasons of Elite — from a private school into an exclusive High-Performance Centre (HPC) in the Pyrenees. Top-performing athletes are hand-picked and arduously trained with the end goal of qualifying for world championships. "A cage full of sharks, snakes and vultures disguised in perfect bodies," in one character's words, should be a stage primed for the exploration of the same themes as Elite, but with the competitiveness, drive to succeed and rancour dialled to 10. Unfortunately, the show flounders in crucial ways. Eponymous clothing brand Olympo is the shady, morally corrupt entity that rules over the HPC. They have three prestigious sponsorships to hand out and every athlete is vying for them. Olympo is the inscrutable central antagonist of the show, but far too poorly run and comical to truly inspire fear. Zoe (Nira Oshaia) is our initial window into this world. Carrying repressed memories of a traumatic accident involving her best friend, Zoe is a heptathlete who was accepted into HPC for her latent athletic abilities. Supposedly more chill and well-adjusted than her soon-to-be peers, Zoe is immediately confronted by the bitchiness and tight-knit insularity of the athletes. The only one to extend any generosity to her is Nuria (María Romanillos), a kind synchronised swimmer who must contend with the ultra-competitiveness of her teammate and best friend Amaia (Clara Galle). This noxious dynamic culminates in Amaia challenging Nuria to 10 flying leg spins — a big deal in the world of synchronised swimming — which causes her to almost drown. It's arguably a high point of tension and excitement before the series devolves. Elite was a mystery centred on a dead body, but no-one dies in Olympo. Rather, the mystery revolves around one of the most maligned aspects of elite sport: doping. There's an endemic performance-enhancing drug problem at the HPC and Amaia is convinced Nuria has been caught up in it. She spends the rest of the season doggedly trying to uncover the extent of the scandal, making many enemies in the process — not least of all, Olympo. Parallel storylines start to emerge. Star rugby captain Roque (real-life rugby player Agustín Della Corte) is openly gay and challenges the homophobia of a sport that prides itself on its toxic masculinity. The curious muteness of Zoe's fellow heptathlete Renata (Andy Duato) masks the fact that she's undergoing treatment for an unspecified condition. Amaia's boyfriend Cristian (Nuno Gallego) is kicked off the rugby team for underperforming but returns seemingly a few days later looking extremely ripped, and catches the eye of Amaia's teammate Fatima (Najwa Khliwa). The setting of the HPC may have been a captivating one if it was believable in the slightest. No-one, least of all the recalcitrant Zoe, is ever pictured training. The pressure of the impossible expectations placed on these budding athletes may have been more plausible if we were ever gifted a glimpse of their rigorous training schedules and difficult coaches. As it is, all we witness them doing is shirking training, partying, drinking and having sex. Where Elite excelled in depicting the shifting loyalties and incestuousness of a friendship group, Olympo tries to do the same to varying results. Characterisation is inconsistent at best, unfathomable at worst. Friends betray friends without reason, people hook up without the slightest demonstration of prior rapport or chemistry, one-dimensionally evil characters are devoid of nuance or complexity, plot holes abound. Nothing makes sense, even by the show's own rules. The antidote to this all is the incredibly well-formed character of Amaia, who buckles under the pressure of a cruelly demanding mother — a former synchronised swimmer herself — and illustrates the difficulty in forming friendships with people who are first and foremost your competitors. Her athleticism is seamlessly weaved into her everyday being in a way that is missing with the others. We see her effortlessly do the splits while speaking on the phone, or contort herself into positions that would be impossible for mere mortals as she does her morning stretches. Our first glimpse of her as she treads water at the bottom of a pool carrying 6kg weights in both hands is stupefying. The selection of sports spotlighted in Olympo is interesting in and of itself. Never have the stakes in synchronised swimming felt so high — Olympo has convinced me of the sheer mastery involved in a way I hadn't comprehended before. Cycling and heptathlons are arguably the less flashy sports of the continuum, but here they are front and centre. Olympo has made headlines for its graphic depictions of sex and for good reason. If you like to watch incredibly toned, sculpted people in various states of undress, this is the show for you. There are corny slow-motion shots of athletes sailing over hurdles, leaping in the air for balls, twisted upside down as they pirouette underwater. There are rippling muscles, beads of sweat rolling down exceedingly chiselled bodies, and the suggestion of a blow-job in a rugby formation. Hammy lines to the effect of "you have to ask yourself how far you're willing to go" further compound the melodrama. It's all extremely silly. At times, Olympo comes close to illuminating the thornier aspects of sport and the way athletes are demonised for transphobic reasons, harking back to the controversy that engulfed Imane Khelif. A line that Nuria delivers towards the end — "When has sport ever been fair?" — could've been the central thesis of the show if it had further delved into the inequities built into competitive sports. But where Olympo is most gripping is in the increasingly complex web of deceit, lies and compromises the junior athletes find themselves embroiled in. This entire silly season is almost worth watching for the way it thoroughly sticks the landing with a twist ending that I did not think it was capable of.