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Health & Fitness

Why Does this Orgy of Bad Ideas Get to Co-Opt the Name "Olympics"?

                 Let’s be honest.  Does anyone south of Manitoba really consider the Winter Olympics real?  Before I begin bashing the hell out of it, I’ll say one or two nice things about this corruption of an international competition.  Skiing is fun.  It’s wonderful that countries like Jamaica have bobsledding teams.  More people almost die in the Winter Olympics than the Summer Olympics, and that’s always a good thing for a spectator sport.   Beyond that, the Winter Olympics are just ridiculous.

                Half of the Winter Olympic “events” are really just some guy lying down.  Speed Napping is now something else we can do better than the South Koreans.  Any sporting event that you can “train” for on a waterpark slide isn’t athletics.  Sometimes the “athletes” are lying down head-first.  Sometimes they’re feet-first.  And, as always, the real winner is gravity.  

                Also, when did skater punk tricks that rebellious fourteen-year-old boys do to impress their friends achieve the same level of respect as fencing or platform diving?  Snowboarding is the look-at-me-Mom-I’m-Goth skater version of skiing.  Now it’s a viable career choice and can land you on the front of a box of Wheaties.  That’s just sad.  Two generations ago what we now call winter athletics was called by one of their real names, “hooliganism,” “stupidity,” and, of course, “a good way to lose an eye.”  Shaun White is now considered a sporting pioneer and elder statesman, like Abner Doubleday or James Naismith (who was Canadian and therefore would probably disagree with me about winter sports).  That means that some loser guy in his late twenties with a raging Peter Pan complex who is very good at jumping over frozen stuff on a polished ironing board is now revered as a hero to younger punk losers.  In his defense, I do respect the fact that he undoubtedly stood up to a lot of “And how exactly are you going to make money out of this?” questions that he undoubtedly received growing up and proved them all wrong.  The real losers here are society and the sanctity of the Olympics as a whole. 

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                And then there’s curling.  That’s the “sport” where one guy plays ice shuffleboard and two other guys sweep.  I can see that those guys are in great physical shape.  In fact, they’re the most fit janitors on the planet.  Now, if we could only turn window washing and vacuuming into events, we could, theoretically, make a full-on Custodial Triathlon.  It’s no dumber than the winter biathlon which involves cross country skiing and target shooting.  Unless you’re planning on pursuing a career as a Bond villain, I just can’t see the real world applications of this one.  It most likely did grow out of winter hunting, but, since modern society has decreed that hunting is evil, I can see the winter biathlon, at some point, morphing into a cross country skiing/broccoli picking event (at least until the Broccoli Rights groups begin to protest). 

                Maybe if I were Swedish I’d be making fun of the real Olympics, the summer ones, right now while cheering on my country’s bikini team and contemplating my suicide, but I’m not.  I’m American.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud that we’re good at these fake sports.  I want us to win, but I know how much easier it is to win when you just made up the sport a few years ago.      

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