On Olympic Closing Thoughts

The Olympics are over, and the Closing Ceremonies have been watched. I had some final thoughts about the XXX Summer Games (sounds dirty, doesn't it?) to share with you. The first thing I would like to say is I was quite impressed with the Closing Ceremonies; it was truly an extravaganza. England brought out its supermodels, superstars, and even dusted off the Spice Girls and dragged them out to perform. Besides Posh and her friends, we saw many more musicians -- some of England's greats, as well as some bands and singers I had never heard of (thankfully they had the band names on-screen as they arrived in the stadium). It was the celebration of a nation.

I was a little annoyed at the Opening Ceremonies, which were dubbed as a celebration of all things English but were sadly lacking England's greatest export, Monty Python. The Olympic Committee redeemed themselves when Eric Idle came out and sang Always Look on the Bright Side of Life at the Closing Ceremonies. This number was not 100% faithful to the original, as heard in the movie The Life of Brian, because the part where it switches up and says "Always look on the bright side of death..." was taken out. The producers decided to leave the line "Life's a piece of shit, when you think of it..." in,  but the sensors bleeped out the word shit. I was surprised that they left the line in to begin with. Good for them!

Throughout the evening's performances, the cameras cut to various athletes enjoying the spectacle (most of the athletes the cameras highlighted showed off their medals) and I began to think about the games themselves.

I love the USA. Well, I love living in America, is what I should say. We truly live in a land of plenty. I am by no means a world traveler -- the extent of my traveling abroad was going to see the Montreal Expos play when I was a kid, and taking a few college trips north of the border. I do watch the news on occasion, and when I see some of the conditions people are living in around the world, I thank the lucky stars I was born here.


Our nation is not without its problems: we have an ineffective political system, an ebbing economy and the government's stance on gay and lesbian rights is pathetic. Let's not forget our immigration policy -- maybe if we had tighter borders, Justin Beiber would never have been able to become the success that he has become today.


But overall, if the USA had a Facebook page (Actually, it does, and the page has 1,165,241 Likes. I just looked. See I CAN do some research.) I would be willing to click the Like button. But I wouldn't click the Like button, because although I am willing, I am a stereotypical lazy American. The point I am trying to make is that I am not a frothing at the mouth "America is the greatest country in the world! Wooohooooo!" kind of guy... except when the Olympics roll around.

The Olympics are supposed to be a celebration of the spirit of competition. All the world's nations come together, no matter what the current political situations exist between them and engage in fair, friendly competition. It is a place of brotherly and sisterly athletic love. This may be the way it is with the athletes, but not with most of the fans who are watching.

Most people can hardly even be called fans of these various competitions. Of course there are many people who do follow these sports, but the average Olympics watcher (which I classify myself as) probably had no interest in watching such sports as ping pong or track and field, before the Opening Ceremonies began. If it were several months ago and someone was flipping through the channels and hit the world swimming finals, they probably wouldn't have even paused in their surfing. But when the Olympics are on, we sit there glued to the television. In fact, this year I found myself staying up much later than I normally would to catch a certain event.


As soon as I started watching whatever event was on, I would look for the American athletes. Once I established which lane they were in or what uniforms they were wearing, I waited for the match or race to begin. And once it started, I would begin cheering on team USA. Wooohoooo!


The thing I found most disturbing, was not the spontaneous patriotism, or the sudden interest in sports that I cared nothing about, but that as much as I found myself rooting for the US athletes, I began rooting for the other nations' athletes to fail. I was happy if the non-American athlete fell off the balance beam, or did a belly flop during the diving. I didn't want to see anyone get hurt, but I did want to see some major deductions. I wanted the other country's athletes to lose and the Americans to win. If I actually took a minute to think about it at the time, I would have been appalled at my desire to have these young athletes' dreams crushed, all for some fleeting sense of national pride.

This Olympic mania went even further than this. I found myself checking the medal counts every morning to see where the USA was in the medal standings. As China had taken an early lead, I found myself hoping for the failure of China's athletes. They became the Evil Empire and we were the good guys. It was just like the Soviet Union was back in the days of the Cold War. It was Rocky 4 all over again with a large Chinese guy instead of Dolph Lundgren.

When the Games ended we had taken the lead and finished with the most medals. In fact, we had more of each medal than any other country. Does that mean we won the Olympics? Do we get a Gold Medal for the Olympics? There are events that comprise numerous events like the decathlon; why not one for the Olympics? We should at least get an MVP (or a MVC -- Most Valuable Country). And is there a congeniality award? I wonder who would get this? England perhaps?

My patriotism peaks at Olympics time. Seldom do so many Americans get this excited to be Americans without a major war involved. Not even a presidential election can get people whipped into a frenzy like a good Olympiad. This is the true magic of the Olympics and unfortunately it only occurs for two weeks every two years. Now that this year's Games are over, we can all go back to our general patriotic apathy and the meat and potato sporting events that we normally enjoy. We also get to rub our victory in the noses of the rest of the world and look forward to winning the
Winter Olympics in two years! USA! USA! USA!

On the Olympics and Water Polo

I was performing my patriotic duty the other weekend, watching the Olympics, when I witnessed one of the most violent sporting events I've ever seen at an Olympiad. You might be thinking that I was watching boxing, or one of the martial arts, but you would be wrong. I was watching women's water polo.

I have never watched water polo before, so when I saw that the US women were playing I thought I would sit down and watch the match. That is one of things I love most about the Olympics. It provides you with the opportunity to watch sports that you don't usually get to see. In fact, those are the events I am drawn too. Forget basketball, tennis, swimming and running - I want to see the javelin throw, the hammer toss, the discus, anything that is unique.

I have always been a fan of obscure sports. Just like in the movie Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story , I wish ESPN 8 The Ocho really existed. Back when I had expanded cable, I can remember surfing through the channels and hitting Australian Rugby or Football... I'm not even sure which it was. I ended up sitting and watching the rest of the game. I thought it was rugby at first but then the players were drop kicking the ball and doing some other weird things with the ball (nothing pornographic, I assure you) and I became mesmerized. I sat there, trying to figure out what the various rules were and how the game was played. This is exactly what happened to me with the water polo.

In the pool there were two teams of women flopping around in the water. When I say flopping, I mean no disrespect at all to these athletes. I grew up on a lake and spent most of my summers in the water. Treading water alone can be exhausting, but this is not the only thing the water poloers (water poloists?) are required to do. They have to swim up and down the pool, fend off their opponents and be able to keep their bodies high enough out of the water to be able to shoot or pass the ball. They have to be in peak physical condition. If I wore a hat, I would take it off for them.

As I watched I started picking up some of the rules. They set the ball in the middle and both teams swam to the ball like a dodge ball game. There was a shot clock, which makes sense because as soon as a team got ahead by a point they could just swim around and play keep away for the rest of the match. Much to my surprise, there were no horses involved.... hahahaha! That is a joke that never gets old. (How come whenever people refer to a joke as never getting old, the joke in question has grey hair, was wished a happy birthday by Willard Scott and is wearing discreet undergarments?)

The game seemed very straight forward: there was a team on offense, trying to throw a ball into their opponents' goal. The other team tried to prevent them from scoring and get possession of the ball so they could go on the attack. Each team consisted of six players and a goalie. In many ways it was like an aquatic soccer match. The thing I was having the most trouble figuring out was the fouls.

The referees seemed to be blowing their whistles every 5 seconds. Sometimes play would pause for a second, and sometimes players got sent to a "penalty box." Other times the team on offense got what can be best described as a socceresque penalty kick/throw. Some penalties were kept track of like in basketball, and if you got more than so many, you could not return to the game. They even had yellow cards, just like soccer. This was the limit of my understanding the game. I did not know what constituted a penalty and how severe each infraction was, and was once again too lazy to look it up on Wikipedia at the time.

All I know was that as I watched, it looked like a shark feeding frenzy was going on in the water. I thought someone had switched the channel to Discovery and it was Shark Week! The women appeared to be mauling each other in the water. It did not look like splashy, splash; it was more like drowny, drown. The women were thrashing around in the water, arms flailing and elbows flying. People were shoving and pushing and looked like they were trying to kill each other. Though the stuff out of the water looked bad, the underwater cameras revealed even more: The players were grabbing each others' suits, and doing anything they could to block their opponents, or to get around them. It was brutal!

There was one girl who had a black eye that she received in a previous match, and it was not from getting hit in the face with a ball. Someone ended up with a cut on her nose in this match. If I was more thorough I would do some research and see how many injuries that were received in the various matches, but just from the one match I saw, it has to be a pretty big number.


Am I surprised that a country's athletes would be willing to do whatever they have to in order to win? Absolutely not! Competition can be fierce, especially when a gold medal (and national pride) is on the line. The real surprise was that all this violence came from something as innocent sounding as water polo. And not to be sexist, but women's water polo. Water polo sounds like a "soft" sport and that is exactly what I was expecting - women tossing a ball around in a pool, doing splashy, slash. What I saw was hard core athletes playing hard and kicking ass!


I apologize for my misconceptions regarding the sport of water polo and send my congratulations to the US women for their gold medal. On watching the highlights of the Olympic matches, seeing the ability of these aquatic athletes and the ferocity of their matches, I feel I can add water polo to my list of Olympic sports I will not be trying out for in 2016.


And on a sad side note, as I was looking for images of water poloists, you would be surprised to see how many wardrobe malfunction clips there were. (Well, maybe not that surprised.)

On the Olympics and Wedgies

I was sitting in bed the other night and thought I would do some blogging. (Yes, you caught me, not all of my blogs are written on the toilet. The first stall is where I usually gather my thoughts and think about new subject matter.) In the middle of working on a piece about my cat, I looked up to see what was on the television. My wife had put it on NBC but was on her Kindle Fire (Product placement! Where's my money? Cha-ching!) and not paying a lot of attention to what was on.

When it comes to television I am drawn to it like a moth to a flame. (In this case, an HD flame.) And it doesn't matter what is on or where I am, I will start watching. My wife has learned that if we go out to a restaurant like Applebees, There's No Place Like The Neighborhood (cha-ching!), she needs to keep my back to the TV. (It could be a Women's Blind Midget Ping-Pong Tournament and I would watch it. Actually, I would probably watch that anyway!)  She left the TV on the Olympic trials. Women's gymnastics was on and I began to watch.

The athletes were amazing! The acrobatic feats they were pulling off were awe inspiring, yet, as you have come to expect from me, that was not the first thing that caught my attention. These young women were jumping, leaping, flipping, tumbling and all I could see were the wedgies they were sporting. When I say their wedgies caught my attention, I do not mean this in any sort of sexual way. These girls are all still in their teens and if I was in anyway aroused, I would not be blogging about it. I would be seeking some therapy. All I could think about was how uncomfortable those wedgies looked.

A wedgie is not a very comfortable thing and something most people try to avoid whenever possible. I was not subjected to any of these as a child, nor did I give any to anyone, as I feel this falls into the cruel and unusual department. The fact that the sport requires you to perform it with the uniform wedged in your ass crack is probably one of the main reasons I never became a female Olympic gymnast. (Well, maybe that, but the penis and the years and years of hard, physical training had something to do with it as well.)

I missed most of the earlier events but started with a little bit of the balance beam and the uneven bars. On a bit of a side note, why is it that I instantly become an expert on whatever event I am watching? As the gymnasts are on the balance beam I find myself saying stuff like, "Oh she needs to focus. That wobble is going to cost her some points. That was just sloppy. You call that a landing?" Who am I? I don't watch gymnastics, ever, and have no idea how they even score these events. Not to mention the fact that I couldn't do what they were doing on the ground, whereas they are doing it 4 feet off the ground on a 4 inch wide beam (Thanks Wikipedia, yet again.) yet here I sit, critiquing their performances, like I have been doing it my whole life.

I did the same things when watching the floor exercises. Forget the running, doing thirty jumps and flips in the air and landing perfectly within the appointed boundaries. I was focusing on the non-tumbling parts of their routines. Yet again, I had transformed into the fourth or fifth judge (too lazy to look up how many judges there are for this event). "That choreography stinks. She looks like she is trying to do the robot. Where is the grace? Where is the fluid motion?" I was turning into Bruno Tonioli from Dancing With the Stars. This, however, is gymnastics, not ballroom dancing. I am sure the gymnasts get points for the "dancing" part, but I bet those flips and tumbles are the biggest part of their scores. Besides, have you ever seen me dance? Holy crap! I'm surprised people don't try to put wallets in my mouth. And I can barely do a cartwheel. Where do I have the chutzpah to judge anyone on this event. Not only are these girls doing incredible routines, but they are doing them with their uniforms riding high and barefoot. They aren't even wearing a nice pair of Sketchers or Nikes (cha-ching, cha-ching).

Yet despite my attempts to be a judge or an assistant coach from the other side of the television screen, it was still the wedgies that concerned me the most. These athletes must either have special suits or the TV station must have perfected the art of switching cameras, because I seldom see them digging their suits out from between their butt cheeks after a routine. Why are the outfits so tight? Does it help with their routines? I get swimming uniforms being skin tight as every tenth of a second counts but does it really matter in gymnastics? I could see not wearing anything too long or loose. I mean, if they were wearing a full length gown they could easily step on it and end up doing a face plant in the middle of their tumbling run. Do they have to be THAT clingy though? Can't they design a leotard that comes down a bit further like bicycle shorts or something? I am just thinking about the comfort of these poor young women.

I give all the credit in the world to any Olympic athletes. So much of their lives have to be set aside for training and such. It seems hard to imagine that these "kids" have much of a life, especially the female gymnasts, being as young as they are. It is not just the Olympics either, these athletes also compete in a variety of competitions all over the world. Do they ever get to sit back with a nice refreshing Pepsi (cha-ching!) and catch a movie like Warner Brothers Pictures new summer blockbuster The Dark Knight Rises, starring Christian Bale, Anne Hathaway, Michael Cane and Morgan Freeman (big cha-ching!)?

And on a side, side note with the very nature of this sport, gymnastics does not seem very useful beyond the competition circuit. I mean, you aren't going to get a call from a friend saying, "Hey! I  just set up the balance beam in the garage. Grab your skin tight leotards and we'll do some tumblin'. Yeah and bring a shoe horn, I feel some serious wedgies coming on." At least the Olympic ice skaters have the Ice Capades and Disney on Ice to fall back on. What do gymnast have? Cirque du Soleil? But then again, maybe this is all just training for those who aspire to where thongs when they grow up.

The last thing I wanted to say is that I am sure this will not be the last post you get from me about the Olympics, so stay tuned. Good luck to all the athletes and let's hear it for the red, white and blue (which should cover a large percentage of the worlds flags)! Now I think I will head over to Burger King and try their new Carolina BBQ WHOPPER®, just one of the items on their new summer BBQ menu. The Carolina BBQ WHOPPER® Sandwich is a ¼ lb of savory flame-broiled beef, topped with naturally smoked thick-cut bacon, pepper jack cheese, freshly cut iceberg lettuce, red onions and ripe tomatoes, smothered with a sweet southern sauce and the tang of Carolina BBQ sauce, all on a warm, toasted sesame seed bun. Uuuuum I'm lovin' it. Ooops wait wrong one. Do I still get the cha-ching?