Summer Medal Moments

It’s official: I’ve gone into Olympics withdrawals. Granted, I’m probably not as down as the London cleanup crews or vendors stuck with shelves of historically unpopular official souvenirs, but now that the 2012 Summer Olympics have come and gone, I’ll have to wait two whole years until the Winter Games in Sochi, Russia.

With the bizarrely boring spectacle of the 2012 closing ceremonies still on my mind, some closing thoughts of my own:

Baseball and Softball were both eliminated from this year’s summer games. Did you miss them? Me either. And how cool was it to watch South Africa’s Oscar Pistorius running on carbon blade legs alongside other world-class athletes? I don’t understand, however, why all the commentators kept comparing him to his “able bodied” competitors. Mr. Pistorius seems mightily abled to me.

All total, there were10,500 athletes from 204 countries in these Summer Olympics. Watching the opening ceremony, I wanted an atlas nearby to see where some of these countries are on the map. I mean, Benin? Burkina Faso? Kiribat? They made those up, right?

On the other hand, I had no trouble recognizing where a whopping 128 members of Team USA came from – right here in California. In fact, I read somewhere that if California had entered its own Olympic team, the Golden State would have had a larger presence at the London Games than Mexico, Turkey, Switzerland and many other countries. Maybe next Olympics we could have a smaller “California” flag for in the opening ceremony? Probably not.  

Speaking of that weird opening ceremony, the producers could have saluted the British National Health Service without the thousands of dancing nurses, patients and hospital beds and simply wheeled out a humongous set of British teeth. Ta da!!: the nation’s health system in one image. And the closing ceremonies were, well, unique. At first I thought they were a big flop, until NBC cut them short for a preview of their new show, Animal Practice, which made the closing ceremonies look stunning by comparison.

You won’t be surprised, but I did have a few questions while watching the Games these past two weeks. Like, can swimmers sweat in the pool? And, if the women beach volleyball players have to wear barely-there-bikinis as official outfits, why don’t the men have to wear Speedos? (On second thought, never mind. Men’s diving was already difficult enough to watch for reasons I won’t go into here. Then again, NBC’s “splashometer” was kinda cool.)

But back to beach volleyball; being held outdoors and all, the popular competition saw its share of classically bad British weather. From pouring rain and soggy sand, to sand that was so cold one of our Team USA women needed a medical time-out due to loss of feeling in her toes. So here’s a thought: why not hold events that can be affected by bad weather indoors and move things like swimming outdoors? I mean, what swimmer is going to be upset if it rains? Just wondering.

Watching both the men’s and women’s runners as they stood waiting to start their respective races reminded me of the way frighteningly powerful dragsters vibrate with pent up speed as they wait in the staging area for the green light. The sprinters seem to quiver with the same barely restrained energy just waiting to be unleashed. Impressive.

Not necessarily impressive but kinda funny were the slow-motion replays of the runners’ faces as they ran towards the camera. You don’t realize how elastic the human face is until you see it in super-slo-mo under great exertion.

The phenomenal Usain Bolt may be the fastest man alive, but certainly not the most humble. Wow, if he wore red, white and blue I wonder if the press would be as enamored of his antics. Not likely.

I’ll admit to being baffled by the number of athletes from other countries who – lo and behold – are coached and train right here in the USA. If I ran the games, the rule would be you compete for the country where you live and train. Period. Otherwise, let’s just turn these things into the genetic games. It’s wonderful that 400-meter hurdles gold medal winner Felix Sanchez won at the ripe old age of 34. Well done, sir. Except – here’s a guy who was born in New York City, raised in California, attended high school here, ran for and graduated from USC and yet he represented the Dominican Republic in the 2012 Summer Games. Um, okay. Or how about Kirani James, Grenada’s home-grown sprinting hero, who, in order to compete at world class levels trains at the University of Alabama. The British are understandably proud of Team GB’s 10,000-meter gold medalist, Mo Farah who trains in … wait for it … Portland, Oregon. And on, and on, and on. Here’s a suggestion: why not hold all the Summer Games in the U.S. since it seems like the great majority of competitors spend most of their time here anyway?

And then there’s the Olympic flame itself. Did you seen that massive cauldron? No? Neither did most of the people attending the Summer Games in London. That’s because the good folks in charge of the flaming cauldron installed it deep down inside the main stadium where only those with the money and fortitude to get a ticket inside are able to see the thing. Every other Olympic flame has burned high and bright on top of the stadium or some other elevated position so all within the geographic area could see it, be inspired by it. I heard that if the wind is right and it’s not raining, you could almost see a heat shimmer rising above the stadium walls. Not too inspirational. In its low-lying position off to the side of the track and field events, even on TV it looked like an oversized campfire that someone left burning.

As far as NBC’s coverage of the games, I would have preferred that they spend less airtime showing us the hobbies and friends and favorite foods and pets of the American athletes and a lot more time showing more actual competition. I could also have done with fewer preliminary events vs. seeing more final events of different sports that aren’t normally broadcast in primetime – events like archery, trap shooting, weight lifting, table tennis, kayaking, even that controversy-rich, scandal-plagued sport of badminton! I’d rather see world-class competitors in those sports than to learn what Ryan Lochte likes to eat for breakfast before a race. And cutting away from the closing ceremonies to air a preview of their ultra-lame new “comedy,” Animal Practice? The biggest boneheaded blunder yet. Even if the show was in any way funny, the network numbnuts responsible for that move probably doomed the show at the outset.

One last Olympic thought; I’m certainly glad that us mere mortals don’t have that bright yellow line constantly moving out in front of us to show how close or far away we are to breaking records with our performance. That dang line would always be several Zip codes away from me.

I’ll see you ‘round town.