The Silence of the Olympics

The Summer Olympics are here!

After a year's delay, the Tokyo Olympics have arrived!

 

Well, sort of.

After waiting to pick the right time, or what seemed like the right time, is actually during a surge featuring the more transmissible Delta Variant.

It's strange.  Almost surreal.  All the events are being played out without spectators.  It has an odd, haunting quality to it.

We've lost a good number of athletes who have either contracted the virus or had to be quarantined.  The part that I find most astonishing is that athletes and staff were not required to have been vaccinated.  That's not good.  It's just begging for a disaster to happen.

Should the games have been held?  Probably not.  But once the commercials winds are soaring, it's hard to bring them back down.  

We may be seeing more of this.  Many, especially in the United States, have mentally put this behind us.  No amount of evidence otherwise will cause them to move to vaccine requirements or lockdowns or even returning to mask-wearing.

So, the Olympics are here, and right or wrong, I choose to watch them.  At least a tiny portion of them (watching all the coverage would take mammoth DVR capacity and several months of dedicated viewing).

Competing, even for the best, is extremely stressful.

I can't imagine how stressful it is to perform in the Olympics, especially for those we've built up to be super-human.  The burdens they carry are tremendous.

Simone Biles is arguably the best gymnast of all time. The things she does defy what we previously thought of as human limitations.  But she is a human being, and like all of us, she has a threshold that may cause her to break or doubt herself.

She reached that in withdrawing from the team competition.  She felt her anxiety was holding back the team, and right or wrong, she thought their score would be better off without her.

But she's not the only one whose high expectations handicap them.  Naomi Osaka, the number one ranked female tennis player in the world, competing in her home country, faltered and was an early loser in the tennis competition.  In both the women's and men's Taekwondo competitions, I saw the number one players in the world lose in early rounds. In addition, the USA men's basketball team looks shaky for the first time in decades.

These disappointments happen every Olympics.  But they do seem more egregious this year.  Perhaps the additional complication of COVID is contributing.  I don't know.  But I sympathize with them all, both those who fail expectations and the underdogs who exceed expectations.

The thrill of following the unusual.

One of my favorite parts of the Olympics is following sports that don't get a lot of play in America.

When the '96 Olympics came to Atlanta, the one sport Alison and I saw together was a team handball game.  It featured the United States playing a premier European team (unfortunately, I have forgotten which one).  The American team was not very good.  The European team looked buff and athletic.  The United States looked like overfed frat boys who had gotten together as a lark. Our goalie reminded me of John Belushi and John Candy.  He didn't, but you could almost picture him drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette while he was trying to block shots.

I fell in love with the sport, at least as far as Olympic events went.  And with my multiple streaming services and unlimited cloud DVR, I've been able to watch more than ever this year.

But that's not all.  I have also seen - table tennis, taekwondo, rugby, water polo, equestrian dressage, the women's triathlon, and so much more.

Follow the numbers

Yes, as hard as it is for me to admit it, I have an accounting/numbers side to me, mostly in relation to statistics.

I used to spend a lot of time with medal counts, coming up with my own valuing system to see who the true medal leaders are. I assigned 3 points for gold, 2 points for silver, and 1 point for bronze.

I don't do that much anymore.  If I did, I could tell you who the top five were at this moment -

United States    61 pts

China                55 pts

Japan                49 pts

ROC                  42 pts

Great Britain    32 pts

Good thing I'm not doing this anymore.  

Let them wear what they want to wear

The Norwegian beach volleyball team made a team decision to switch from bikini briefs (emphasis on BRIEF) to shorts (they look to me similar to the shorts cyclists wear).  They made this decision in a European Handball League.  It was the European Handball League that fined them, not the Olympic executives.  You may not like the decision.  That's understandable.  But please understand where it came from.

The Olympics deals with teams all over the world, and modesty standards vary.

This is a picture of a beach volleyball contest.  Can you see a difference in what each team chose to wear?  The Egyptian team is dressed one way, and the Italian team another. Can you tell which team is which?

The point is, I don't really care as long as it is the athletes themselves who choose what they wear.  I have heard some commentary from female beach volleyball players that they have reasons for wearing what they wear, and it is for competitive comfort and not to be vavavoom.

I take them at their word.  Let them wear what works for them, and the rest of us shouldn't judge one way or another.

Are sports sexualized?  Maybe.  But...spoiler alert...humans are sexualized.  Ask some women who watch the oiled-up shirtless flag-bearer from Tonga, divers, wrestlers, swimmers, or water polo players.  If they're honest with themselves, some of them are sighing.  It's hard to get around.  Heck, the original Greek Olympics were done naked (or so I hear - I wasn't there).

What you don't want to see is athletes forced to wear what they don't want to (important proviso - team sports have to make a decision AS A TEAM).  

I hope that is one thing we can all agree on.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some beach volleyball to watch.