The Cold War also had a lot to do with the greater popularity of the Olympics. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, interest in the games noticeably decreased. As for Jenner, the Decathlon was once one of the most anticipated events of the Games but now, most Americans barely pay attention to it. (Does anybody even remember who won the gold medals in the Decathlon over the last 20 years?) The same can be said for boxing. It used to be hugely popular not only for nationalistic reasons but also because it was almost always a preview of who would be contending for championship belts a few years later. Now, because professional boxing has been in steep decline over the last 30 years, there’s considerably less interest in Olympic boxing.
Getting back to the OT, I’m trying to remember if Jenner was ever featured as a guest commentator for any of the Olympic broadcasts after 1984. ABC and NBC often brought back former gold medallists to comment on the events they once competed it but I’m not sure if Jenner was one of them.
Sure, no one would know she was a stripper at the time, but I do think it matters how long ago it was that this information was discovered. I think it’s also likely relevant that she’s always used sexually charged lyrics and tends to push a very sexualized image.
I do think most people who know of Caitlyn Jenner at all know she was some sort of famous athlete, as that was why her transition made the news. But the specifics I would expect only to be known by those who lived through her fame, or those who heard her talk about it on her reality show.
And, before she transitioned (as in your OP), it doesn’t surprise me that they didn’t even know she was a sports star at all if they were young enough. I’d also never heard of her before her transition.
I live in the US and that shit is just not on my radar. To me, a kardashian is some oddly sculpted humanoids that were featured on one of the less-watchable Star Trek series.
This is what I thought. But my anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise. In the group of eight people I was in, everyone knew who Jenner was. But only two of us knew she had been an athlete.
That was the game rules. You could only use one word clues.
The word that was being guessed at was decathlon. And while this thread shows Jenner may not be famous as a decathlon competitor, you note correctly that there is a sharp drop-off before you get to the second most famous decathlon competitor, which I guess would be Jim Thorpe.
Ashton Eaton is the current Olympic champion. He’s an American and he won the gold in 2012 and 2016. But I feel confident that if you went out on the street and asked a thousand random people who Ashton Eaton is, none of them could correctly identify him.
Yeah, a new poster trolled up the boards for a few hours dropping inflammatory responses in a bunch of threads. The mods did quick work of the clean up!
I didn’t play this one, and had to research it but there was actually another Decathlon game from Sports Illustrated that my friends and I did play, and it included Bruce Jenner along with Jim Thorpe and a bunch of other “famous” decathletes. It was actually pretty interesting.
So I knew who Bruce Jenner was from his Olympic feats and subsequent Wheaties box, and other related fame.
When he showed up with the Kardashians I was surprised, but IIRC he’d expessed some wacky views in the years between and I guess that made her next announcement a bit less surprising.
I’m actually somewhat curious what a board game version of a track and field sport would look like. I kind of regret not picking up a copy of Bruce Jenner’s Decathlon back then, if only as a curio/conversation piece. (I can still get it on eBay for $30 if I ever feel I need to assuage that guilt.)
There also was a decathlon video game back in the day – it was one of those joystick wiggling, button mashing style of games like Track & Field. For the 2600 and then ported to some other computers. There was also, apparently, a Microsoft Decathlon that came out earlier, but I’m not familiar with that one. Apparently, decathlon was still a thing in the public conscious in the 80s, but I honestly have not heard about the combined event much since then. It was a high prestige event, as I understand it, at one time, but more people care about single-event achievements, particularly, the 100m dash.
I think the board game would only work for a decathlon (as opposed to single track events), because you win a decathlon by getting the most total points against a pre-established list for each of 10 events (eg, a high jump of 7 feet gets 200 points or whatever).
So in both real life and on the board game, you are trying to balance out expending effort/injury risk vs maximizing your performance in your best events (none of which I understood until I played the board game, which used special dice to create variables that then combined to equate to points on a chart for a particular event).
So the decathlon winner in real life isn’t the best at any one event like the 100m but pretty good at a lot of them, across speed, jumping and strength events, plus have the endurance to do all the events in two days. But they’ll never set any individual world records in a single event.
A few cycles after Bruce’s triumph the marketing folks at NBC tried to build up a rivalry between two other Americans but I can’t recall their names.
Still, that was pre-transition. I was saying people only knew she was an athlete post-transition, because that was part of why her transition made the news.
Before that, I could believe they’d only ever heard him talked about for being on Keeping Up With the Kardashians as the (step)dad of the girls.
