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Thursday, August 19, 2004
8:55 AM

Olympic Rant

I drafted a whole other post about the Olympics and its various events which is all ready to be posted (naturally it is witty and insightful as always). Then I realized that I had something more important to say about the Olympics:

NO MORE SWIMMING PLEASE!!

And I could also do without more gymnastics.

I don't know about the rest of you, but somehow whenever we tune in to watch the summer games, the only thing that is on is either swimming or gymnastics. Seriously. There are just too many different variations in these two sports.

First they have like 20 different qualifying heats for each swimming event. 100 meter. 200 meter. Freestyle. Butterfly. Backstroke. Breaststroke. Men. Women. Dogs (ok, that I actually would like to see). An infinite number of combinations of the foregoing. Team relay, again combining the distances and strokes and genders in seemingly endless variations. Then they have the semi-finals for each (another interminable series of races). Finally, only after waiting a gazillion years, watching lap after lap after lap, and feeling waterlogged just watching, you actually see a race which results in a medal. To be honest, you are lucky to even know if the race is the medal race or not. Most of the time you just lose track (and interest).

I say that at most they should show the semi-finals and the finals. Probably just the finals. We really don't need to see dozens of qualifying rounds. I would have thought the swimmers had been significantly narrowed down before coming to the actual competition. Had I known how broad the starting group is, maybe I would have given it a shot. Better yet, just give the medals to Phelps and be done with it. Everyone repeat after me: NO MORE SWIMMING!

Gymnastics is nearly the same, much as I love it. All the apparatus. Individual and team competition. On and on it goes.

Sometimes I wonder if I am actually watching the same event being re-broadcast and am just clueless (which is entirely possible if not probable). I really have lost track at this point. And I don't really care. They could be showing footage from the Sydney Olympics and I wouldn't know it.

Maybe part of the problem is that we can generally only watch in the evenings. Maybe they show all the exciting sports like judo, archery, and rowing during the day. (Any of you day time watchers - please let us know what we are missing. We clearly must live vicariously through you.) And what happened to all the track and field? In any event, it is almost 100% guaranteed that when we get home from work, if we turn on the Olympics, it will be either swimming or gymnastics (notwithstanding the fact that we have Olympics available on at least three different channels). And we've had our fill.

Luckily for us, Lost in Translation was on one of the movie channels last night. Followed by Under the Tuscan Sun. So no Olympics for us. Maybe tonight will be different.

Please join us in hoping for something, anything, other than swimming or gymnastics tonight.

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