Olympic Musings - Salon

Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it.

 

Being an utterly unathletic person who abhors watching sports, why do I absolutely love the Olympics?  Why have I spent countless hours avidly watching every single Olympics since the tragic 1972 Munich games that are the strongest memory of my 14th summer?

Well, first of all, the Olympics are insanely dramatic.  People train their entire lives just for a chance to compete in them. If you have a bad day â€" or a bad hour or a bad minute â€" it’s at least four years before you can try again, or maybe you never will, depending on your condition and the competition when the time rolls around.  There really is the famous “thrill of victory and agony of defeat” in a way no other competition comes even close to.

Second, coming into the Olympics, most of the competitors aren’t wealthy from their sport (some are in fact impoverished from pursuing it).  They do it for the sheer achievement of stretching themselves to their limits and winning Olympic glory.

Lastly, most of the sports are individual events.  I’m a diehard individualist, which is one reason I’m not interested in most professional sports.  I actually don’t think most team sports should even be part of the Olympics â€" at least not sports that get plenty of attention and money otherwise (hockey, basketball, etc).  The Olympics are at their best in shining a light on sports that normally get little or no attention.  And once current professional team players were allowed to compete at the Olympics, pushing aside the top amateur players, team sports lost all meaning and poignance.  (Imagine the famous "Miracle on Ice" with veteran NHL players.  Ain't quite the same, is it?)

And now some random thoughts I’ve had watching the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, which are heading to the finish line this week:

NBC stands for Nothing But Commercials.  I’ve watched Olympics for nearly 40 years and I’ve never seen so many commercials breaking in so often.  I swear it’s 50% commercials.  CNBC is better â€" and they have curling!  We’ve renamed them “Curling NBC.”

 

 

Curling is a corking good sport.  We’ve been learning the rules as we watch, and the commentary really varied. It was all cryptic inside curling lingo unless the US was in the match, in which case the basics were repeatedly over-explained as in the annoying commentating for all the other sports.  They know most Americans will only watch curling if their compatriots are in the game, but also that they’re clueless about the sport. After hearing the expert commentary (which had me going online to translate it), I felt incredibly talked down to during the US games.

Curling does have a real domestic flavor, what with all the talk of houses, “good curling maintenance,” brooms, hammers, correct weight, biters, as well as the cries of “harder!”  Uh, well, I guess it depends on your domestic arrangements.

Sports that show the athletes’ bodies are much more exciting and impressive than sports where the bodies are subordinated to a piece of equipment like a sled.  One looks like doing; the other like taking a ride.

 

The bobsleds look like the transportation in The Jetsons.  That kind of takes the dangerous glamour out of it.  “I saw that in a cartoon when I was 5.”

For safety’s sake, they moved the men’s luge to begin at the women’s start line.  But why did they move the women to the “junior” start?  To save the men’s ego, that’s why.

Women's hockey included a Chinese player named Xu Ting.  You can't make stuff like that up.  Well, yes, you can…if you're in junior high school.

Snowboard cross is truly unpredictable, as the men's final proved.  Seth Westcott Ohno’ed his way from the back to the gold.

Speaking of the slippery demon, Apolo Ohno really lucked out in the 1,500 when the South Koreans got into a Three Stooges fight for the gold and Larry and Curly knocked each other out.

Speed skating is impressive, but well, boring. The fact that it’s timed vs. head-to-head races is part of it, although ski racing has no such problem, so I think it’s the monotony of the motion that’s the real issue.  I thought short track was insane when it first appeared in the Olympics but now I’m a convert.  It’s incredibly dramatic and fun to watch.

 

If Shaun White isn’t endorsing hair care products of some kind, his agent is asleep.  His hair has more corkscrews than his tricks. He's the Farrah Fawcett of our time.

I noticed Lindsey Vonn went very quickly from saying she was just happy to win one gold medal after being injured to being very disappointed she didn’t win another.

Bulletin:  Ski racing has reached the absolute limit of what the human body can do. Watching some of the skiers in slo-mo, not falling down even after getting off balance and flying along on a single ski but instead recovering and not only finishing the race but doing well…it’s clear that it’s not possible to push it any further.  Really.

Some macho sports fans claim figure skating isn’t a sport because the skaters wear silly costumes.  Have you guys ever stepped back and taken a good long look at how football players are got up?

For some strange reason, most of the figure skaters have been using music from the three classical albums we had in my house growing up.  Watching their routines, I sometimes feel like I’m in some kind of dream sequence from a movie about my life.

A Japanese figure skater did his short program to Jimi Hendrix. We need more of that.

 

I don’t care what the Kerrs say about not thinking of themselves “that way” when they’re skating; it’s a little icky when a pair is made up of a sister and brother.

It seems easier to psych yourself out in figure skating than any other Olympic sport. I think it's the time leading up to the jumps, which seems akin to preparing to jump off a cliff. Skiers and sliders don’t have the luxury of anticipatory anxiety once their runs are underway.

Scott Hamilton obviously still feels like he's out there on the ice.  I love how he can't control his voice in both excitement and disappointment. It's endearing.

Thank god John Tesh isn't doing the Olympics anymore. He once ruined an entire Olympics for me.  At every Olympics, the ex-athletes do much better than the so-called professional broadcasters in covering their respective sports. The skating commentary has been wonderfully restrained. They actually let the top ice dancers do their routines without saying a word to spoil the show.

Ice dancing…the best costumes won.  And I think the silver-medal-winning American male ice dancer escaped from the Shire:

First the Russians were whining about losing the men’s figure skating gold medal.  Then the Germans were complaining that the Canadian curling fans were cheering their country’s team too loudly.  What has happened to these countries?  They’ve gone from tyrants to wimps.  They need a good World War to get their mojo back. 

 

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.