The Olympics

The Olympics are over, and to the Olympics I say: fair-not-so-well. Welcome to a world without bronze medals (medals for third?), without luge, without Bob Costas, without that overplayed John Williams theme song that I used to love but now, with increased maturity (and crankiness) have come to despise the way old men despise chewy food, without snowboarding and without skiing (of any variation) . No more Winter Olympics!

Another way of putting this: I'm of two minds about the winter games and although I typically attempt to keep my minds together, I'm making an exception today. One mind says that the Olympics are numbingly boring crap for the masses and I can't believe anyone, save a few desperate, cableless lonelyhearts, would wade through hours of luge, bobsled and curling in order to get to the three or seven moments of genuine goodness. (I'm basing my estimation on several intense years of research, plus a pictogram of Bob Costa I saw carved into the rocks on a cave wall in Carmel, California). My second mind says this: the Winter Olympics suck. I'm probably preaching to the converted (who else would read this far?), but I can't stop myself from venting my frustration anyway: couldn't NBC have run a Twilight Zone marathon instead of the Olympics? Or maybe just dead air. I imagine those watching wouldn't have noticed the difference for at least three days.

According to Happy Stan, who often doubles as my trusty research assistant, the ancient Greeks started the Olympics. They ran, they jumped, they competed. They never skiied. They never skated. They never snowboarded. They never shot rifles on skis. They never bobbed. Stan did unearth some texts showing that the ancients may have luged, but only because they were a much more open-minded society than many of us realize. So is it even fair to call these games Olympics? Just one glimpse at a man snowboarding down a hill and you know it makes as much sense to use "Olympics" to describe these events as basing your brand of toothpaste on its resemblance to other clean things, like you're favorite glass kangaroo bauble.

Okay, okay. Maybe (you're thinking rhetorically) that just because the Ancient Greeks didn't enjoy this cornucopia of winter sports doesn't mean that WE shouldn't. They never ate grapefruit either, but that's not stopping us. You are of course wrong about that -- no one eats grapefruits. And you're wrong twice over because no one enjoyed this recent cornucopia of pseudosports, not even your mother.

But even granting our athletes' rights to call various permutations of sliding down a hill on a board "the Olympics" doesn't alter the compelling facts: it's all so very boring. (And am I the only one who thinks they added all those snowboarding events just to give Americans a better chance of earning medals?). I turned on the Olympics last week after dinner (and after a hoard of maruading investment bankers broke into my apartment and put a gun to my head and forced me to switch from the World's Strongest Man Competition, which is, I've no doubt, a sport the Ancient Greeks would have endorsed wholeheartedly). The marauders stuck toothpicks in my eyes and still I fell asleep during a luge event. Worse, after watching the Olympics, the bankers turned hippy and moved to Vermont.

I do have to admit a certain fondness for speed and figure skating, even if I don't think they're Olympic sports. Speed skating is just cool -- and somehow I think the ancient Greeks would have speed skated had they thought of it (and had ice). And figure skating is kinda sexy. Scantily clad women twirling around on ice. Sweet. And I don't have to go to a strip club to enjoy the privelege. But please don't tell me that figure skating is a sport. Sure, it's athletic and those women/girls are incredible athletes. But there's no stop watch, there's no finish line and the poor girls are judged; after a while watching the competition becomes not much more interesting than watching a room full of tightly clad young women taking their SAT tests. I'll leave it to you to decide if that's something you'd like to do.

So lets can the Olympics and just have a one sport event every four years: how many variations of speed skating can you think of (100 meters, 120 meters, 200 meters, etc...)? And lets put some poles on the ice for those figure skaters. Yeah, that'd be hot...