Tag: olympics

These ladies are BAMF. Seriously.

Thanks to the wonders of the BBC, I’ve actually been watching the Olympics, and had things to talk about with my coworkers, though I’ve noticed I don’t really watch the same array of sports as most of them. Sure, everyone gets in to gymnastics. But I’ve been all about track cycling lately, which I’m guessing maybe isn’t a thing unless you already like zooming around on bicycles.

I ran out of cycling events to watch yesterday with the Women’s Omnium finishing (SCREAM LAURA TROTT YOU ARE SO AWESOME) and nothing else was really jumping out at me, so I decided to take a look at synchronized swimming.

I already knew that synchronized swimming is super hard; I’ve got a friend (hi Cam!) who used to do it. I didn’t really need the British announcer lady reminding me constantly that these athletes train for ten hours a day, five days a week. But there’s a certain defensiveness to it, I think.

Because yeah. When you tell people you’ve been watching synchro, I’ve noticed that they smirk at you in a particularly annoying way. Because apparently it’s not a real sport, or something.

(Ever notice that the things that are smirked at over not being Real Sports tend to be the ones that just ladies do? Like rhythmic gymnastics and synchronized swimming. Though I have also heard people dissing trampoline gymnastics.)

So far my standard answer has been to suggest locking said smirker in a room with a synchronized swimming duet and see who comes out with the win from that encounter. That normally ends with an admission that yes, they would get their ass kicked in a most humiliating way. I think anyone in their right mind wouldn’t really want to fuck with a woman who can hold her breath for two minutes with her head pointed straight down as her legs kick through the air so quickly you can’t actually see them. And then she smiles the entire time.

Seriously. Just because it’s pretty doesn’t make it any less of an insanely difficult, bad-ass sport.

As a follow-up from yesterday’s post, Ye Shiwen has taken numerous drug tests and been shown to be clean of any doping. Hell yeah, woman, good for you! There’s a phenomenal editorial in the Guardian about the utterly shitty way people are still going after her, which I definitely recommend you read.

I hadn’t really thought about the potential racist/nationalist element in it as well, because I was too busy being incredibly pissed off about the overt misogyny of Performing Too Well While Female. I suppose China is the new superpower to be feared. My own thoughts on human rights abuses aside, I’ve never understood the logic of disapproving of a country by being childish toward their athletes. I was still in grade school when the Cold War ended so I missed out on a lot of the more ridiculous US versus USSR stuff, but whenever I encounter its relics now I still feel incredibly puzzled. Yes, athletes act as a representative of the country’s might and blah blah blah but how exactly does being a jerk have any kind of policy impact? I’d be shocked (and appalled) if anyone ever sat down at the negotiating table and tried to use the great performance of their men’s gymnastics team as leverage.

It doesn’t really seem to be about disapproving of policies or politics, but rather just feeling threatened that maybe America doesn’t get to be the best at everything ever. There are a lot of people in this world, and someone does eventually get to be the best at something. Statistically, they can’t all be from America, whatever advantages we may or may not have. And at this point I’m so heartily sick of the doctrine of American Exceptionalism that it’s gone through annoyance to eye-rolling malaise.

Which is really a long way of saying I wish America would grow the fuck up. Every time another country outdoes us at something the reaction tends to be either outright denial (“We do too have the best healthcare system ever!”) or doing an excellent mean girl impression. And I know there are other countries out there who think their way of life gives them some sort of inherent superiority, to which I also say: In the end we’re all still just human beings. Please grow the fuck up.

One of my fellow interns is Chinese. He and I regularly check the Olympic medal standings and tease each other about them. There’s nothing wrong with friendly competition. If China manages to take home more medals than us, I’ll slap him on the back and buy him some soft-serve from the cafeteria. That’s how it’s supposed to work. You have fun competing, and then no matter who wins there are congratulations all around because everybody tried their hardest. Yeah, sometimes it’s hard to be happy for someone else when you had your heart in it. That’s something I still obviously have to work on myself. But hey, that’s part of being a grown-up human being.

I think it’s probably also part of being a grown-up country.

Not related but also good commentary on icky things at the Olympics: Laurie Penny on beach volleyball

I actually do like the Olympics. Or at least bits of it.

In the past, I’ve made it my business to watch gymnastics, archery, diving, fencing, weightlifting, and a lot of other sports. I’m not really someone that’s in to sports generally. I think watching them is a lot less fun than going out and doing stuff, but I make an exception for the Olympics. It gives me a chance to watch sports that aren’t normally televised or all that celebrated. It lets me cheer for underdogs that really are underdogs as opposed to one team of incredibly wealthy men versus another team of incredibly wealthy men.

And I’m actually kind of pissed off this year that I seem to be missing all of it.

Some of this is my own fault. I don’t have a television, so the only way for me to watch it is on the computer. Nicely enough, I now have two computers that are fit for watching television, so I could conceivably have the games on one while still doing work on the other.

Except for the part where NBC sucks. Oh yeah, that.

I tried going to the official NBC site for the Olympics. Apparently you’re not allowed to watch online unless you’re already a cable or dish subscriber. Which I find kind of mind-boggling, because why the hell would you be watching the games online if you could already do so on your television? Maybe they’re trying to hit the valuable people-trapped-in-the-airport demographic.

For the record, I don’t have cable. I don’t want cable. I don’t watch enough TV to justify the expense, and I’d really rather just do my watching online via streaming service like Netflix and Hulu, which I do pay for.

I just really don’t understand it. They could put all the commercials they’d like in streaming online feeds, and they’d get seen. Hell, they’d get seen by people like me who normally manage to evade television advertisements. You’d think that would be desirable.

And this isn’t even touching on some of NBC’s other unfathomable decisions, like the time delay on the opening ceremonies, or that they edited out chunks of it because apparently Americans are just too self-absorbed to appreciate the tragedies memorialized by other countries.

At this point, if I want to watch the Olympics, I’m going to have to pretend to be British in order to do it. Well, there are worse things. But the number of flaming hoops NBC is putting between people and the games feels like a reminder that it’s not really about the spirit of sport and competition, if it ever was. It’s commercialization and controlling the product now, I guess.

Damnit, I just wanted to watch women’s weightlifting, not unwind my eye-rolling cynicism. Was that too much to ask?