One of the easiest things anyone can do once every four years is to sit on the couch, watching TV coverage of the Winter Olympics and carp, complain and generally criticize the genetically blessed, gorgeously fit athletes who don’t live up to media-generated expectations.
So here I go.
With the mountains of hope and hype heaped on the U.S. Olympians, there was bound to be some disappointments. But I can’t remember another Winter Olympics during which so many “destined for the podium” athletes not only didn’t turn in medal-worthy performances, they didn’t come close; Shaun White, Shani Davis, Julia Mancuso, Ted Ligety and many other names unfortunately come to mind.
For the past almost two weeks it’s gotten so that as soon as I hear the label, “strong gold medal favorite” or “favored to win it all here in Sochi” attached to any U.S. Olympian, I fully expect to see them finish several positions lower and slower than even the winner of the bronze. Many of the Chosen Ones haven’t even finished in the top ten.
To be fair, there have been several well-earned, come-from-behind surprises for Team USA, like Andrew Weibrecht taking the silver in the Men’s Super G ski race ahead of his own “destined for gold” teammate, Bode Miller. Wait, Andrew who?
As frustrating as it’s been to see so many disappointing results, the most disgusting moment of the games by far was last Sunday night’s badgering of the above-mentioned Bode Miller by NBC hack reporter Christin Cooper. Ms. Cooper was relentless in asking the bronze medal winner questions about the loss of his younger brother, Chelone, who died from a seizure last year. Miller, in full emotional breakdown mode after being asked numerous different ways about how it felt not to have his brother there to see him race, finally took a knee behind a partition where the incessantly insensitive woman couldn’t get to him. Luckily for NBC, however, there was yet another camera at snow level that was able to stay with the visibly shaken Miller as he sobbed. A tweet later that night with the hashtag #NBCFAIL said it all: “Christin Cooper wins gold for worst human on the planet.”
A few other Olympic observations before I run out the clock:
You know the games are in trouble when one of the more riveting stories has been whether or not NBC’s Über-anchor Bob Costas’s would turn in a DNF due to a world-class case of pink eye.
It was a kick watching Crescenta Valley’s own Kate Hansen boogying to Beyoncé before her Luge heats. While the 21 year old La Canada native ultimately didn’t make it higher than 10th place overall, her teammate, Erin Hamlin went on to win the first ever medal for a U.S. luger. You go, girls!
Speaking of Luge. Who in the wide world of weirdness came up with the idea of Doubles Luge, an event featuring two grown men lying on their backs, one under the other, sliding down an ice chute at 80-plus mph on less than a trash can lid? Awkward doesn’t begin to describe the spectacle.
The motto of these games is “Hot. Cool. Yours.” Well, hot they got. But they could have used a lot more cool. Might as well have held the games in Los Angeles for all of the winter conditions provided by the tropic-like Sochi region.
And so, with the closing ceremonies of these 2014 Winter Olympics only a couple of days away, couch critics like yours truly will have to wait another four years until the “destined for gold” athletes and others gather again in PyeongChang, South Korea on February 9, 2018. I’m already setting my DVR.
And if anyone thought security was an issue in Russia this time around, just wait until game organizers have to deal with whatever trouble that nut-job-northern-neighbor-with-nukes, Kim Jong-un, dreams up. Let the games begin, indeed.
I’ll see you ‘round town.
Regular readers know that a few times each year the wonders in my noggin spill over onto my keyboard. With all the scandalous news of late – from Boston to Benghazi and the IRS to the NSA – the wonderings have become a flood. So strap on your waders and let’s dive in:
I wonder … what ever happened to coverage of North Korea’s tyrannical, bizarrely unstable dictator, Kim Jong Un? Mere weeks ago the world was poised on the brink of nuclear war with the polyp from Pyongyang. Today? Crickets.
I wonder … who is the sadistic person who designs hotel shower valves without the words “Hot” and “Cold”? I also wonder how much water is wasted trying to figure out how to get the right temperature from those infernal things?
I wonder … if anyone is concerned about the student body at Morehouse College in Atlanta. I mean, if it’s true (as we’re told repeatedly) that gender, race and social diversity are critical to the quality of higher education – does that mean the students at Morehouse College where President Obama gave the commencement address in May are being shortchanged? After all, they attend one of the most narrowly defined student bodies on the planet – all men, all black, all of the time. Hello, ACLU?
I wonder … if anyone else thinks Toyota should have named its popular Prius hybrid the “Pious” or better yet, the “Pass Us”?
I wonder … if anyone else thinks the word “fruition” gets funnier the more you say it?
I wonder … how anyone will ever again be able to walk a dog when plastic bags are banned from the face of the earth? Not to worry, at the rate government intrusion into our lives is growing, I’m sure we’ll soon have a Department of Doggie Defecation along with a library of regulations for federally-approved production, retrieval and disposal of canine emissions.
I wonder … if you choke a Smurf, what color does it turn?
I wonder … how our President can say “If there’s a step we can take to save even one child, we should take that step!” to a wildly cheering audience of gun-control zealots, yet only days later be the first President ever to honor and praise the attendees at a national gathering of Planned Parenthood; an organization responsible for ending the lives of hundreds of thousands of babies since the 70s. Can you spell “hypocrite” boys and girls? Whoops, of course you can’t. You’re not alive.
I wonder … why our State Department didn’t claim that the two cowardly Boston bomber brothers were motivated by an offensive anti-Islam YouTube video that nobody on the planet has seen?
I wonder … how fast we mere citizens (aka: “sheeple”) would have our bank accounts seized and be thrown in prison if we tried the same tactic at an IRS audit as Lois Lerner (director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations Division) used during her congressional hearing last month? “I’ve done nothing wrong and I refuse to answer any more questions.”
I wonder … why, as the brilliant African-American economist Thomas Sowell has asked, it is considered greedy to want to keep the money you have earned but not greedy to want to take somebody else’s money through higher tax rates?
I wonder … how any politician or pundit can say with a straight face that we the people have nothing to fear from the omnipresent government monitoring (spying) on each and every one of us – all the while the disgusting IRS scandal continues to grow in scope and importance?
I wonder … speaking of the obscenely arrogant, criminally corrupt and hyper-partisan IRS, what level of financial-terrorism we will all be subjected to when the IRS bloats its staff of thugs to enforce the coming onslaught of taxes and penalties facing every single American once Obama-care is in full force next year?
I wonder … how this all ends? I’ll see you ‘round town.
