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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.
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Is that where they get the famous scars?
I get mine mail-order.
Everything manly is considered unnecessary by the Euro-Weenies.
If not actually evil.
I played intermural water polo in college. Yes, it’s as rough as it looks. There were only 4 teams, which should have been a big hint, but the guys on my dorm floor talked me into it. One team was ex-water polo college team members. Ouch. They could swim laps around us. And under the water line, a high contact sport. Lots of grabbing, pulling, kicking. And if it was an open ball, they would just swim right over you. They could hit the net from anywhere. The scores would be like 10 to 1.
On spending, WSJ has a piece on it,
The Tokyo Olympics’ Staggering Price Tag and Where It Stands in History.
Here is the link.
This did not age well.
I think it still applies. One must separate her physical accomplishments from the mental burden. Too many suffer mental issues today who aren’t under the pressure she is under. Even worse, she is alone since family can’t travel. She didn’t get to where she is by doing afraid of physical pain. She is haunted by mental demons.
The immortal Cap Anson once said of pitcher Pink Hawley “A million dollar arm and a ten cent head.”
I’m pretty sure they used that line in Bull Durham.
Cap said it first.
His Wikipedia entry:
I don’t doubt that the Bull Durham writers stole it.
No harm. A line that good and that widely applicable that is over a century old has been repeated over and over again.
Right up there “I wish I had said that.” “You will, Oscar, you will.”