Are you an Olympics "homer"?

The Game Room
21

Oh, perhaps things have changed. It’s been Olympic mania for a long time now, at least where I am (Yunnan province). Seems like every other store has had Olympic paraphanelia on display for at least two years, and the kids (and, to a lesser extent, adults) have all seemingly been brainwashed by it.

The fact that the government been so annoying with visas and such because of the Games also rankles. A friend of a friend had been living in China for 7 years working on a degree, and his visa is suddenly revoked, and he’s told he has to leave the country within a week. His [unspoken] crime? He’s Muslim, from Turkey. It’s all of the post-9/11 US craze for a freakin sports event.

22

I was. I had a powerful emotional stake in both our basketball teams. I shook my head in disgust when some cowardly little snot invoked some unbelievably petty, brainless rule that hadn’t been enforced in 30 years and knocked one of our guys out of it. I lamented that our gymnastics teams worked their butts off year after year, and not one of them could even sniff the podium. I was riveted to the early swimming coverage and jumped whenever one of ours won a close one, which was pretty often. And again with track and field. I was riveted to the medal counts. I learned all about Bruce Jenner. Carl Lewis. Mary Lou Retton. Greg Louganis. Florence Griffith-Joyner.

And then the Soviet Union fell. Our greatest enemy, our unfathomably mighty nemesis, the biggest factor in us getting shafted, crushed, boxed out, buried, smashed, and routed…gone forever.

(Aside: How would you have liked to have been an ex-Soviet athlete in '92? Country going through landmark, history-making upheaval, wholesale changes seemingly by the hour, no more flag, no more anthem, don’t even know what the dang three-letter abbreviation is going to be, massive power vacuum at the top, future full of uncertainty, confusion, and chaos, and through it all, you’re trying to train for the event of your life.)

The Evil Empire, even including the last-gasp “Name Du Jour” period, would never win another medal. From '96 on, the all-time medal count was ours. Count '80 and '84, don’t count them, makes no difference. No more balatant cheating, judge bribery, or petty whistleblowing…what’s the point anymore? No more political drama. And except for niche events like judo, no podium was out of reach. Hey, take the USSR, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland etc. out of the equation, who the hell’s left to humiliate us in gymnastics?

Cheering for Mom and apple pie and starry flags and overpaid baseball players and motorcycle rallies and unlimited soda refills and unwatchable game shows and gangsta rap…well…it’s just not important anymore.

For me, now, it’s all about the games themselves. A muscular behemoth raising an impossibly heavy weight into the air. A wiry runner flying down 100 meters of track. A skinny boater immobilized from the waist down negotiating a treacherous stream with nothing more than a double-bladed oar and two strong arms. Dedicated athletes doing amazing things. Who cares about colors?

(Another thing about medal counts…isn’t it weird that all the events, objective and subjective, team and individual, single contest and multiple rounds, etc., get the exact same award? I can’t be the only one who thinks this. I should start a thread.)