Olympian Thoughts

My parents didn’t watch sports, but they did watch the Olympics, only because Norway generally gave a good account of itself in winter. As a child I found this rather embarrassing, not because Norway won a lot of gold, but because it only won gold in the sports no one ever heard of -- events involving snowshoes, moose hide, and fish. While glamorous ski jumpers aspired to a Telemark landing, it wasn’t the guys from Telemark who tried to land it.

I’m of course old enough to remember the Olympics during the cold war era, which was the primary reason I did watch it. We in the West were the good guys; the communists took steroids. And for awhile, that had an element of truth. You could instantly identify the woman swimmer from East Germany; she looked like Schwarzenegger in a one-piece. At the other end of the spectrum, the female gymnasts from the Soviet all had the body of a child and the face of a grandmother, and when they talked it was at a pitch only the family dog could hear. Not sure which drug was responsible, but I’m guessing it’s banned now.

Back then, we had a dog in the fight – it was called the West and Fair Play; honest amateurs suiting up against the cheating professionals. We didn’t stop to consider that all our athletes seemed to work for the post office. We just knew the rivalry was so riveting, any contest seemed worth watching – grass growing, water boiling.

But then the Berlin Wall fell; everyone moved everywhere. Now the Austrian skater was born in Belarus. Denmark picks up a gold thanks to its citizen from Croatia. There’s only an us when there’s a them, and there’s no them there. And while this may be good for world peace, it wreaks havoc with the popularity of Curling. It also eliminates any reason to watch skaters dressed in cast-offs from a high school performance of Cabaret.

About the only thing left is to get involved in the inevitable stories involving the individual athletes. The guy who lost his mother, father, and both legs in a plane crash and came back to learn to snowboard on his nose.

Or, come the summer Olympics, we can spend the time speculating why the seedy male gymnastic coach from Romania is always hugging and kissing and holding those little, little girls. But really, we should have been wondering about that one for a couple of decades now.