Bonus Olympic Post!

I love the Olympics. I get excited every time they come around, doubly so since they started occurring biennially. I particularly like watching the opening ceremony, not so much for the pageantry, which for the most part I don’t understand. For example, these past Winter Games, I understood the Ferrari burnout, and that’s about all. As lame as it may sound, I like watching the athletes enter the stadium because they all have the same hopeful look in their eyes and they’re all bursting with potential. Even those few that have a snowball’s chance of even making it past the first round of competition, but they are just as happy as a kid in a candy store to be able to represent their country and do their very best on a world stage. Often times I wished I had the skill necessary at some sport that I could walk with them, but the best I can do is cheer for them from the comfort of my living room. Besides envying the athletes for their opportunity, I also respect them for the abilities both in their sports and in their good-natured competition.
I can’t say that I like one season’s Olympic Games over the other, but I am certainly more boggles by the winter games than I am by the summer games. I look at the summer games, and I see things that were elements of everyday life when the games began, such as lifting heavy stuff, running fast, running far, and besting your fellow man in unarmed combat. I have no problem that a group of guys would get together on the weekend and see who was better at this stuff than everyone else. The summer games are not without their unique events, such a race walking, which I just don’t get. I’m having trouble imagining a person saying to someone else “I bet I can get from here to there faster than you with at least one foot firmly on the ground at all times faster than you.” More troubling would be someone saying to that proposition “You’re on!” But I digress. The winter games are just packed full of odd sports, encompassing pretty much everything that takes place on the bobsled track. Here’s how I see that coming about:
Norseman #1: “Hey Lars, I bet me and Olaf and Dolf and Bjorn can push this bathtub down the chute and make it to the bottom before you guys can!” (4-Man Bobsled)
Norseman #2: “Yeah, well, I bet just me and Sven can do the same thing faster than a pair of you two!” (2-Man Bobsled)
Norseman #3: “You bunch of cowards need a bathtub to sit in? I’ll go down that slide on just a plank of wood!” (Luge)
Norseman #4: “Only sissies slide feet first.” (Skeleton)
Or something like that. I have en equal level of confusion regarding the mogul run. Not that I doubt the difficulty needed to go down a mogul run, but the jumps and twists in the middle confuse me. When was that added?

One type of sport I deeply respect is downhill skiing, if only because I have been skiing and know just how hard it is to keep the pointy ends of the skis aimed at the bottom of the mountain without some degree of self preservation instinct telling me it would be a much better idea to just fall over now before a tree gets in my way. And then they say that downhill skiers reach speed of something crazy like 80 miles per hour during the fast parts of the track. I get nervous and sweaty-palmed going that fast in my car, and at least there I have a steel cage and anti-lock brakes and airbags and various other measures designed to save me if something goes wrong. These people have a helmet and goggles on their head and an angstrom’s width of Neoprene protecting everything else. By way of comparison, the vertical feet they descend which can be measured in seconds, I usually take days to cover. Only once did I make it down the mountain in near-Olympic time, and my reward was much more valuable than a gold medal. There’s a story behind that, it’s inappropriate to tell here, but you can ask me about it personally some other time.

I am also impressed with speed skating of any kind, particularly the long distance speed skating. The men’s 10,000 meter race took something like 13 minutes to complete. It takes me the better part of an hour to skate that far, and I don’t mind saying I’m darn winded at the end of that time. From strictly a spectator’s point of view, I thoroughly enjoy short track skating; I think it’s a blast to watch that. Speaking of skating, I have lost a few of my reservations about figure skating since they added the quantitative portion of the scoring. I feel better about it as a sport now that there is a definitive point value assigned to different maneuvers. I was never a fan of awards being given based on subjective scores.

Although I did not plan to address individual athletes in this post, I have to say something about Bode Miller, and his dismal performance at the games. For lack of a better way to explain it, I found this guy to be a total scumbag. He never gave me the impression that he was giving it his all, which is what is to be expected of an Olympic class athlete. In all the interviews with him, it sounded like he just showed up at the games so he would have a new set of beer stories for when he got home. With the exception of the race where he spectacularly crashed through a gate before being disqualified, his performances were nothing exceptional, and I have no idea where all this hype that he brought to the games came from. In my opinion, if he is ever invited to the games again, it will be too soon. He does not have the personality or discipline to be in the Olympics, not to mention the skill.

I enjoyed the past two weeks when I could turn on the TV and fine some Olympic even going on. I liked knowing that somewhere in the world people from all over the planet were congregating to challenge and compete and go home having given everything they had to the sport of their passion. I have plans now to go to Vancouver in 4 years for the next winter Olympics. I want to dress up in red, white, and blue and cheer like a maniac for whatever American competes in whichever event I can get tickets to. I think I would like to put down in my life’s resume that I soaked up some Olympic atmosphere. Anyone care to join me?