The
Agony of The Public
If someone started, say, a professional
rhythmic gymnastics league in 32 cities around the
world I'm
pretty sure
the attendance would be… modest. If by "modest" you
mean the athlete's parents, a handful of easily manipulated
friends, plus whoever came in second place at
a local karaoke contest and won the free ticket package
rather
than that extra-yummy, super-humongous platter of
jalapeno poppers.
Multiply this obscure "sport" by about fifty,
mush them all together in one exotic locale, call it
the "Olympics" and
suddenly we're supposed to be interested? Really? Trampolining?
Competitive sailing? Racewalking? Those aren't sports,
those are novelty categories in the back of Guinness
World Records.
Worse, not only did a team of sports
journalists prepare a
30-minute
backstory
of, say,
one particular
racewalker (Probably. I don't know.) but somewhere,
someone is sitting on their couch happily prepared
to watch
the
damn thing
as though
there was a teat on it tomorrow.
At least the Olympics had the good sense to occasionally
discontinue certain questionable events like rope-climbing,
club
swinging, and (I am not kidding) the All-Around Dumbbell
Contest but somehow golf,
on hiatus from the Olympics for a
few years, was back for Rio 2016. Man, fuck that elitist
crappola. Gimme that Aztec
game
where teams
of
players
fight
to maneuver
a small leather ball through a tiny goal ten feet off
the ground, using only their feet, and the losing team
DIES. Now THERE'S a sport for you.
I personally don't need the Olympics as I think it's
just one huge, luridly-expensive occasion for chicanery
and corruption, borne on the backs of the people and
the athletes, and profited from mightily by the
organizers.
I watched exactly one Olympic event and that was the
soccer finals
between Germany and Spain Brazil. That's a real
sport, one that millions of people follow, one that
actually
pays
for itself and has players we'll actually hear from
again
between
now
and the
next Olympics. (And, oh yes, basketball. But the
American squad is just an all-star team we cobble together
every
few years from an available pool of millionaire atheletes
to assure ourselves of another medal in a
sport
we invented. Yeah, real sporting of us.)
=Lefty=
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