Olympics

Aaaargh! The Olympics are here!!! Noooooooo!!!

I have very mixed feelings about the Olympics. When I was a kid, the Olympics were on in Los Angeles. My school ran a competition to design a poster for an Olympic sport, and the prize was this special book all about the Olympics, with lots of glossy photos. I so wanted that book. I think I must have been bouncing around the house being all obsessed with Olympic stuff, because a couple of days later my mother gave me a copy of that same book! Oddly, I was kind of disappointed, because I had wanted to win it rather than be given it. I think that reflects positively on my moral character, don't you? My disappointment only lasted about 10 minutes though, because it was an awesome book and now it was mine! I learned everything I have ever needed to know about the Modern Pentathlon from that book. I can still remember a picture of Glynnis Nunn throwing the javelin as part of the Heptathlon. She had this crazy muscle popping out of the side of her neck, that I now know to be the sternocleidomastoid muscle. In my next set of exams I can inform the examiner that the sternocleidomastoid muscle is not on an accessory muscle of respiration, but can be used to hurl javelins! Bonus marks!!

Anyway, mixed feelings for the Olympics. I love esoteric sports. I spent six weeks in Canada a while back. Spent most of it watching curling on tv. Awesome! The Olympics is a great time for me because for a short time it seems like there are enough sports in the world that everyone can win a gold medal for something.

But there's a downside to that too - some of those "sports" are pretty lame. I mean come on, trampolining? And I'm not big on swimming, which is a shame because Australia tends to do well at swimming so every single damn race gets shown. Face up to it people - every race looks the same. You can't tell the swimmers apart in all that splashing. I think they're showing us the same race over and over again and just changing the commentary. And a quick aside: there was a swimmer on tonight (bald of course) whose surname was Nederpelt. This made me laugh because to me, "Nederpelt" sounds like it might mean "Hairless" in Dutch. Maybe his name used to be Grossepelt before he shaved his head.

And then there's the drugs. (I'm talking about the athletes, not me.) I'd like to see the Olympics re-formatted so that drugs are no longer feasible. It would run like a military draft. Everyone in the world would have their name put inside a ping-pong ball (one ping-pong ball per name, not all names in the same ball) and they'd all go inside this big biscuit barrel and be drawn out at random by a minor celebrity, event by event. And then helicopters would go out and grab those people and they would have one week (say) to train for their event, just to eliminate the most fearfully gumby performances, and then - the Olympics!

Because the odds of being chosen at random to compete for your country would be so small, it just wouldn't be worthwhile taking performance enhancing drugs in advance. So you'd get people competing in a real state of nature. I personally would pay big money to watch a bunch of obese Americans plummet from the 10-metre board in the synchronized diving. And every now and then, maybe once per games, you'd get someone who actually knew what they were doing and put on a good show.

Memo to the IOC: you heard it here first!