BK, have you been watching any of the Olympics or do they not interest you?
Maybe this sounds odd, but i just can't imagine anyone not being interested.
It may sound odd, but they really don't interest me in the least.
I would think that at least certain sports would interest each person (they could be different for every person).
But even if i hated every single sport at the Olympics, to me it's a matter of national pride. I just can't imagine not caring.
It's nice that people want to be the best at something. I can understand that. Whether it's rolling logs, collecting stamps, contorting one's face until it looks like the rear end of a constipated rhinoceros, there is always the potential for entering the record books.
Now, the Olympics is a big deal in the sense that they are held every four years and feature (arguably) the best in the various sports disciplines being celebrated...winter sports and summer sports.
But, frankly....outside of a few of these sports, I'm not really interested in watching the events. The human interest, however, is another matter. The athletes' personal stories...the struggles, the sacrifices, the years of honing their crafts...these are what make watching them perform memorable to me.
I couldn't care less about cross-country skiing or a host of the other Nordic "original winter" disiciplines that were adopted when the Winter Olympics was established. But tell me a great story about one of the competitors and I'll watch.
What these Olympics have lacked, for me, is a sufficiency of personal interest. I detest media hype about who's favored to win Gold, blah-blah-blah.
Lindsey Vonn fell today and was disqualified. Lindsey Jacobellis fell two days ago and her four-year dream of redemption for a faux pas in Torino was ended. Boo and Hoo. I know their hearts were broken. I feel bad about that. It was someone else's turn, though...becasue someone ALWAYS wins a medal. And that's what sports are...games in which someone wins and someone loses.
The Olympics have been, for far too long, a heavily politicized exercise in nationalistic fervor. The athletes cease being their own selves and become national properties. When they falter they are reviled, some of them, if sports analysts think they made stupid mistakes. After all, didn't those athletes sacrifice everything to be judged/criticized by a media hack? And some athletes who qualified to participate, but who have no delusions about being in contention for a medal, are the objects of media attention because MAYBE they might pull a HUGE upset. No pressure intended, of course.
Going for an Olympic medal is a lofty goal. I, for one, feel the presentation of the sports should be done with dignity, respect for the athletes, and with a mind toward the fact that the public doesn't know much about most of them in terms of difficulty, the interest they hold for the participants, etc. I don't get any sense of "dignity" associated with Olympics presentations. Something is missing and I cannot quite put my finger on it.
Oh...well....MAYbe it's because I'm just not watching beyond the few events that interest me this time around. Too many other things in life seem more important to me than someone's having put life on hold for four more years to see if they can redeem bad judgment made at the last Olympics.
