Pit the Olympics

The BBQ Pit
61

I’m not going to pit the Olympics. I’m going to pit the people who call me an asshole for not watching them. Infact I think I did this pit during the last Olympics.

Every 2 years it’s always “HOW THE HELL COULD YOU NOT WATCH THEM??? It’s your duty as an Earthling!” or “THIS ONLY HAPPENS EVERY OTHER YEAR, YOU"RE MISSING OUT ON HISTORY!!!” or “DON’T YOU WANT TO WATCH SOMETHING THAT EVERY NORMAL PERSON ON THE PLANET IS WATCHING TOO?” … and my mom was bitching me out on the phone earlier tonight for not watching the opening ceremonies, since they were the most elaborate and expensive showcases ever done.

Okay first of all, I’m not a conformist. I’m not gonna watch something JUST because everyone else is watching it. Secondly, I’m not into sports. I’m especially not into boring weirdo sports. Lastly, not everyone on the planet was watching because where I live, we get the Olympic coverage from NBC, who has to stick to their primetime schedule and hense is delaying broadcasts for 12 hours…so we’re only watching with other Americans in your time zone.

And on a related note, what’s the big fucking deal about the opening ceremony? It seems like every single one I watched was just an hour long march of all of the athletes carrying their countriy’s flags. You seen it once, you’ve seen them all. Oh, and a torch.

And lastly, I ran a lap at the location of the original Olympic games in Athens. Anybody else who has done so, go ahead and call me an asshole for not wanting to watch them, otherwise shut up.

62

And on the other side, you have some non-Olympic watchers sneer at people who do, with all the HOW CAN YOU WATCH THAT BULLSHIT? etc etc.

63

Ya know, I say this every couple years, and yet I’ve already watched about 100 hours of coverage already. :rolleyes:

Jeez! I need to get off the couch.

64

The boxing is on. That is good. Last nights badminton was interesting. Womans softball. which is off the Olympic agenda next time, was on. There is a lot of volleyball. The women on one team average 6 ft 7. It is a good game. Beach volley ball is fun.
I never knew badminton could be such a vigorous game. Love it all.

65

And continuing the Games DID help to bring them back to life? (There are many indifferent replies to threads but yours is a knockout).

And could you please explain how it wasn’t a propaganda victory anyway?

66

The idea is

Option 1: People dead. Athletes bummed.
Option 2: People dead. Athletes bummed. But they still get the chance to live out their dreams and do they thing they spent years or even lifetimes training to do.

67

You’re missing the point a bit spectacularly. You’ve created a choice: the hopes and dreams of the athletes, etc, vs. the murder of 11 athletes. Then you’ve tried to argue that the one means more than the other. But the problem is, there never actually was that choice. The athletes were already murdered. You couldn’t stop the murders, or the pain associated with their aftermaths, by stopping the games.

So on the one hand, we have millions of dollars put into staging an event. We have people who have spent their whole lives preparing for a few minutes of potential glory at this event. We know that cancelling the event will cause these people real disappointment and emotional distress - not as great as the emotional distress caused by the murders of course, but the murders already happened so that’s not really part of the calculus. We also know that cancelling the event will result in not insubstantial financial losses for a variety of interested parties.

So what, exactly, is the reason for cancelling the event? What is gained?

Respect for the dead? I say fuck that, vigorously, twice. Stopping the Games doesn’t show respect for them; stopping the Games would have been fetishization of collective mourning. Stopping the Games because those athletes were murdered - when we would not stop them because 11 random people in Botswana were murdered - is saying that what mattered about those athletes, what made them special, was the circumstances of their deaths. No fucking way. They weren’t special because of how they died; they were special - like everyone wants to be, I guess - because of how they lived, who they were when they were alive.

And when they were alive, they were friends, athletes, teammates You do no honor to their lives, and you help in their deaths not at all, by disrespecting those things, by refusing to allow their friends and teammates to accomplish in their absence what they all set out to achieve together. You do no honor to their lives by taking away the chance for a bit of joy from their survivors.

You know what? Here and in semi-public, I formally state that if I am ever murdered in the context of some larger event, and if anyone has the temerity to use my death as a reason to stop life in its tracks for the people who continue on after me, I will haunt them to their graves. Play the Games, throw a party, and if my team wins, send a medal to my family and everybody do a shot in my honor. Seriously.

68

If Al Qaida killed approximately 50% of the US Olympic party at an Olympiad in, say, New York, you don’t think the games would be stopped? I am pretty certain if the same level of terrorist outrage had been perpetrated on the Soviet team in 1972, the games would have been abandoned.

69

Now there’s a controversy surrounding the little girl who sang during the opening ceremony. Story here. It seems she was lip-synching to another singer. The real singer was judged to be the best but not cute enough, so they fronted the little girl you saw instead.

Excerpt: "Miaoke, a third-grader, was judged cute and appealing but ‘not suitable’ as a singer. Another girl, Yang Peiyi, 7, was judged the best singer but not as cute. So when Miaoke opened her mouth to sing, the voice that was actually heard was a recording of Peiyi.

"It was unclear whether Miaoke knew she was being dubbed.

“‘The reason was for the national interest,’ Chen Qigang, general music designer of the opening ceremony, explained during a Sunday radio interview. ‘The child on camera should be flawless in image, internal feeling and expression’.”

EDIT: China’s response is here.

70

It’s a little different if it happens to the host nation’s team.

71

The reason I picked NYC would be the symbolic importance of it after the 9-11 attacks. Just as there was a degree of symbolism involved in the Israeli team being in Munich.

Even without that - if tomorrow half of the US Olympic party was killed in a bombing in Beijing, do you think there is any way the games would go on?

72

Probably, yes. And they should go on. I’d expect a delay and period of mourning but otherwise I’d imagine all the other countries and athletes would continue and might dedicate their performances to the murdered athletes.

73

Thank you, that explains the sparse crowds for the equestrian events. I had watched a news segment that said all the events in Beijing were SRO, and so I was puzzled at the lack of people at the horsey type stuff. I had thought it would be a big thing.

Now I see.

74

I’m sick to fucking death of swimming and Michael Phelps.

There are more people in the Olympics than JUST Phelps. Christ, they can’t make it through a single event, no matter what it is, without at least mentioning his name.

75

And now it seems the 200 female guides who led the athletes out onto the field had to strip naked for their measurements to be taken, along with thousands of other applicants. Story here.

Excerpt: "The 200 female guides who led each country’s athletes onto the National Stadium during last week’s opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games had to strip naked to qualify for the job, a local media report said Friday.

"Thousands of young ladies from colleges and dance academies in Beijing competed for the chance to appear before a huge worldwide audience.

“During the selection process, the women were required to strip so teachers judging whether they were qualified could measure their body proportions, The Beijing News said.”

76

A: 1.3 Billion potential customers for the Olympic sponsers. It is all about the money.

77

So what do you have to do to qualify for the job of being one of those judges?

78

Indeed. Actually, I wasn’t all that sure that deserved to be Pitted. :smiley:

79

It’s a travesty that the Summer Olympics are being held indoors. Indoor swimming, indoor beach volleyball, and, presumably, indoor track and field. The more progressive media abroad should be all over this, but I don’t see it happening.

On the other hand, with regard to human rights issues, I’m glad to see that even our mainstream TV networks are throwing a few punches China’s way, instead of just repeating how great everything is because now they’re having the Olympics.

80

I don’t mind them talking about Phelps, but the whole “Greatest Olympian” and “Greatest Athlete” stuff is starting to piss me off.

Yes, he’s the greatest swimmer right now, and arguably the greatest swimmer ever. See ya, Spitz.

No, having the most gold medals doesn’t make you the Greatest Olympian. It just makes you a dominant force in a sport that gives out scads of medals.

Alexander Karelin was stupidly dominant in his sport. For 13 years, nobody could touch him, in a one on one combat sport. He went years without an opponent even scoring a point on him. Yet, the poor guy only has 3 gold medals. Phelps can get three gold medals in 2 days, so clearly he’s the “better” Olympian. :rolleyes: