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Watching the Olympics Through the Looking Glass
As I do every four years, I’ve spent the weekend watching countries I don’t care about play games I don’t care about. It’s not as boring as it sounds, although it’s certainly, um, surreal. I mean really, really weird. I’ll try to explain with a few observations, in no particular order:
- Ping pong is a strange sport. Sorry; table tennis. And in a development which surprised no one at all, the gold medal game will be between China and Japan.
- The American corporations who buy advertising time on the American TV stations to promote their products to Americans apparently believe that there are very, very few white people in America.
- Water polo looks brutal. I wouldn’t play that sport without a life preserver, a football helmet, and SCUBA gear. Actually, I still wouldn’t play that sport. Those people are nuts.
- Simone Biles may be the best athlete I’ve ever seen.
- I’d never seen dressage before. It’s a competition in which horses sort of prance around slowly, nearly dancing, while carrying a person wearing ridiculous clothes. This is what happens when you give white people too much spare time and way too much money. The longer I watched, the more I thought that perhaps wealth taxes aren’t such a terrible idea…
- The commercials are following today’s trend of featuring average-looking people, better to identify with their target audience or something. If there is a truly beautiful woman in an ad, she will be black. And if there is somehow a truly beautiful white woman in one of these commercials, she will have a crew cut and a tattoo of a snake on her neck.
- I thought I had played badminton before. Apparently, I have not. Holy crap. It’s nearly violent. And they’re not drinking beer while playing.
- It’s my understanding that most cities that host the Olympics lose money. Not always, but usually. I wonder how the books look for Japan right now? No fans at all. Beautiful, enormous, brand-new stadiums, purpose-built for each individual sport, with 15,000 empty seats in every single one. Restaurants and hotels are empty. Zero ticket sales. Can you even imagine how much money Japan is going to lose in this deal? Oh my God.
- Since the Russian Olympic Team was found to have widespread egregious violations of drug policies over the past several Olympics, Russia was not permitted to participate in this Olympics. So the Russian athletes are participating as the “ROC”, or Russian Olympic Committee. They don’t have a Russian flag on their uniforms. That way, the athletes have not doped up steroid monsters now. Much better. I’m sure that the athletes from the other countries are glad that the Olympic Committee resolved that issue. Whew.
- I can’t imagine working my entire life to have the opportunity to compete in the Olympics and then performing in front of empty, quiet stadiums. How heartbreaking.
All that adds up to a surreal viewing experience. Watching sports I don’t know anything about, with athletes I’ve never heard of, with commercials that appear to be filmed for a foreign country, with announcers trying to build enthusiasm for games that nobody is watching in empty stadiums. It is really weird.
I usually enjoy watching the Olympics. I get all wrapped up in it, every time. But watching this, I feel sort of sad.
This is a strange world we live in, my friends.
Published in General
Annie Goodwin was an eventer. Eventing combines show jumping, dressage and a cross country jumping course over a three-day competition. She was schooling/training her horse over “training-level” cross country obstacles, which are 3’11” high and often solid. Apparently the horse fell on her.
A former event rider, Danny Warrington, started a program called LandSafe, which teaches riders how to handle falls. I took the course a few years ago. It works best for falls taken at speed. I know a rider who has competed at the Kentucky Three Day event who credits the training with saving her life. You need to know the feeling where its time to bail out, and how to fall to protect your head.
Reports I’ve read said Annie Goodwin’s horse fell on her. Perhaps when was not wearing a safety vest while schooling. Vests (often an air vest that inflates when rider is separated from the horse, sometimes worn underneath a hard foam vest) are required in competition. Sometimes while training riders will not wear all the safety equipment they should. I don’t know what Annie was or was not wearing. A tragedy.
Sounds like the pass-times of Upperclass Englishman. But much more wholesome.
I was stationed in Korea during the Seoul Olympics. A blessing… I could attend and I was spared NBC coverage. (I watched Korean TV.) Some athletes and TV folks had bad behavior that upset the more polite Koreans. The locals started pulling for whomever played our teams.
Exactly. The communication between a horse and rider is so sensitive that even head movement can send a signal to the horse.
This is exactly how I feel about these Olympics. It is so very sad. Is there anything the left doesn’t ruin the minute its slimy tentacles reach out and touch it? These athletes are young and supremely healthy. COVID is nothing more than a cold for them if they contract it. We have allowed this disease to take over our lives and ruin nearly everything. I am so sick of it.
Now I am going to have to watch the darn commercials. I always record my TV and fast-forward through commercials when I go back to watch the shows. As such, I haven’t had the pleasure of viewing the new woke style advertisements. I am counting on seeing every style of human relationship. How exciting…I can hardly wait!
Wow, she’s nearly your daughter!
Sicilians aren’t even considered white by other Italians. My wife’s family are all Sicilians.
Curling…now there’s a sport that makes my blood boil!
I like the curling video someone made using a Roomba and brooms.
Also, is it just me, or do the announcers seem to be “America-neutral” – at best. In the coverage I have seen, albeit brief, the announcers have been so flat on the American athletes. It is as if there can be no national pride and the sportscasters are the neutral reporters for the world. For instance, the swimming competition broadcast last night – American powerhouse Katie Ledecky (most decorated female swimmer of all time) placed 2nd behind Austrialia’s Ariarne Titmus in the 400m freestyle. The “human interest” story in the lead-up was all about Titmus – not Ledecky – and the announcers seemed super pleased to see the American beat. To me, it is as if the sports news people are egging on the demise of the idea of American exceptionalism and glad to show that American’s aren’t anything special.
You could always nap with the pleasant commentary in the background, which is what I do when Mr. C has it on.
NBC coverage has always been mediocre. They don’t even play enough of the Arnaud and John Williams music. With apologies to John Williams, but this is the only way to play Arnaud’s Bugler’s Dream. Don’t cut off the second half. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiDaId3w3sA
And the American uniforms are now using muted colors, and avoid the combination of red, white, and blue which might suggest America. Consider American Olympic uniforms from the 80’s:
Compare that to our current gymnastic uniforms – these don’t shout “America” in quite the same way:
And then look some of our other uniforms – this American badminton player competed in the Olympics yesterday in this uniform, which doesn’t even use American colors:
Americans appear to be ashamed of ourselves.
This is embarrassing.
Not saying you’re wrong, but it could be as simple as “David” (i.e., Titmus) taking on and beating the Goliath that is Ledecky. Most sportscasters play up stories like that.
It is very dangerous.
Remember Christopher Reeves? I believe his accident occurred during a steeplechase.
That tattoo could be attractive.
Isn’t there a saying along the lines that Africa begins at Naples?
I really love Confucian shame.
I had to mute the volume. Rowdy Gaines, the “color” guy, sounds like a shrieking banshee.
And if it’s a commercial with a mixed-race couple and kids, the kids look like the “minority” side.
Christopher Reeve broke C1 and C2 when he went head first over a triple bar jump…starting with a low pole, a middle height pole and a tall pole. Think of a parabola…the horse has to take off far enough away from the jump (in a triple bar the optimum takeoff spot is 1-1.5 times the height of the tallest bar) to be able to clear it. Jumping can be tricky because a rider can make a mistake and set up the jump in a way that the horse cannot complete the jump. If you look at Percival’s video, that horse stopped because it could not jump the obstacle (that one is called an oxer, with two bars); that was not a “dirty” stop, the rider made an error. No horse likes crashing through jumps. Christopher Reeve had a similar fall, but he did a lawn dart into his skull. This is the sort of accident that the LandSafe training addresses (“protect the moneymaker”). Nobody likes to say it, but Reeve was an amateur and amateurs make mistakes more often than professionals.
I’ve watched a bit of Olympics and I’ll say, these “observations” are far better.
I’ll echo the point about Badminton, whoa Nellie those fellas are playing a different game.
While I can’t fathom how skate boarding is an Olympic sport I do feel badly for that Japanese kid that was just crushing the event on his way to Gold. The crowd would have been awesome for him had there been one.
When you’ve been taught for 20 years that America is evil, it’s probably hard to work up a lot of enthusiasm to support it.
You’re thinking of The WOGS begin at Calais.
I think that’s genetics Kedavis.
Well, in reality, kids with one white parent and one black parent tend to look somewhere in between, not like only the black parent.
Is the kid at least lighter skinned?
You mean mensur?
From wikipedia:
Academic fencing (German: akademisches Fechten) or Mensur is the traditional kind of fencing practiced by some student corporations (Studentenverbindungen) in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Latvia, Estonia, and, to a minor extent, in Belgium, Lithuania, and Poland.However, in Switzerland it is nowadays frowned upon to carry out this tradition, for it is considered unnecessary violence. It is a traditional, strictly regulated épée/rapier fight between two male members of different fraternities with sharp weapons.
Preparations for a mensur; here between members of a Polish Corporation Sarmatia and a German fraternity (Freiburg im Breisgau, 2004)