I DON’T KNOW how many sour-pussed Olympics-haters we have in our country. I don’t know what percentage of Americans is unmoved by the work put in, the opening ceremonies, the personal stories, the pride in being host, and the struggle for individual and team glory. I don’t know how many sneer at the whole panorama. I only know this: I’m one of them.
For starters, the process of choosing host cities is as dirty as John Walker’s socks. People dive over each other to bribe these officials, and if there’s anything more ironic than giving suitcases full of money to European socialists, I’d like to know what it is. If you haven’t noticed, The Great Honor is never given to places like Burundi or Latvia, because there are no Four Seasons hotels in Burundi or Latvia. Arise, ye prisoners of starvation. (The only hard part of a stay at a Four Seasons is that that’s how long it takes you to pay for it.)
Who wants the Olympics, anyway? Who’s waiting for the announcement with closed eyes and crossed fingers whispering, “Oh, please, please, please . . .” As with political conventions, local governmental leaders tell you the games will bring great tubs of cash into town, but they never do. In fact, they always cost great tubs of cash, don’t they? My money. Your money. More importantly, my money. Have I mentioned my money? No, the only ones who really care are the couple of dozen councilpeople in each of our cities who “run things” (or, more exactly, don’t). They care, all right, and they care deeply. They want large events to come into their homes for the simple reason that, for a short while, it gives them the illusion that they’re actually doing something with their lives. We would all be better off if these preening camera-hogs spent their time figuring out whether your sister-city should be Bonn or Trieste.
Unless you’re living in Ted Kaczynski’s old place, you know about the controversy over the judges in the figure skating competition. Now, I’m pretty sure my marriage and family is exactly like yours in all the important ways, especially this one: My wife adores figure skating and watches it all the time, all year long; I hate it deeply and would just as soon watch a Richard Simmons workout video, which, come to think of it, is much the same thing. But I was watching with her the entire night of The Big Flap, and there was, simply and objectively, no blinkety-blanking way the Russians won it. Of course the Canadians won. As the saying goes, a blind man could see it. I have no animus against the Russians anymore, especially since now, just like us, they have a McDonald’s every thirty feet. But they lost. The guy slipped! If Martians had landed and seen it, they would have said, “The Canadians, no question. By the way, why are none of the women skaters sexy anymore? Now, Katarina Witt, that was a body. Incredible wheelhouse.” (It turns out the Martians think very much like me.)
But when it came out that the judges were corrupt, one felt moved to say, “Well, who didn’t know that?” I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling’s going on in here. I mean, for decades we all joked about “the East German judge,” right? The horrible medical experiments they put their “women” through would make Dr. Mengele look like Marcus Welby, and anyone with half a brain (or Gray Davis) always took it for granted that the old Soviets and their paramours (or Gray Davis) would do anything they could to win more medals. In the days when the U.S. team had to strictly adhere to amateur standards, the Russians and almost everyone else treated their players like de facto pros, which is why some of those old hockey games looked like a six-and-under league getting hip-checked by Paul Bunyan and Babe.
Okay, what about personal achievement? The years of sacrifice and work? Frankly, most of the stories the athletes fondly recall in their interviews strike me as spooky. “Oh, yeah, when I was seven I’d be out practicing in the snow for ten hours at a time, crying from the pain and disorientation, and when I’d ask my father for a break, he’d come storming outside and scream how sleep was for losers. Heh-heh-heh. good times, boy. Without him I wouldn’t be here.” Well, then, I’m sorry, but maybe you shouldn’t be there.
Speaking about nearly criminal stupidity, let’s talk about the luge. Really, why is that even a sport? I’m serious. More than once I heard commentators say, “There’s not a lot a steering possible. You just hold on until it’s over.” The comparisons to love-making aside, I don’t see how you can call something a sport where the only goal of the human is just to survive it. Because if that’s the case, I think we should send these contraptions down the chute empty. If the guy on them isn’t doing anything but praying, let’s just weigh them down with copies of those Will and Ariel Durant books everyone has and no one reads and see who wins. Give the gold medal to the guy who made the silly thing in his garage. “Bob, the Ukrainians are favored here, because they don’t even use the course. They just heave a dogsled off a mountain into thin air and have gotten some terrific times using nothing but gravity. And what a personal story. Their chief mechanic, Papa Geppetto, has been a medal-winner in the puppet competition for decades, and this year he’s also hoping the bobsled fairy will turn his skeleton into a boy.”
I personally think the over-zealous parents should be strapped to luges themselves. Or used as luges. I’d fly to Salt Lake to see that. Is the medal that important to you? Okay, you do it. Because, I’ll tell you, those parents’ interviews are as unsettling as the kids’. “We were pretty strapped, but I quit my job so we could follow her coach, Bela, around the country. Boy, he likes strip bars. Anyway, things were hard for a while, because, for the first year, Bela makes the girls stand outside holding buckets of water in an iron cross. Once you get in the class, he spends three days spitting on you. Then you have to trim his mustache. We had no money for food, but that was okay, because Shannon was almost forty pounds, and that’s the limit for twelve-year-olds.”
I’m the only person I know who agreed with John Gielgud in “Chariots of Fire.” And when it comes to the physical and emotional price paid in the years of lunatic training? That’s not “focused commitment,” it’s manic desperation. And if that really is what it takes to win a medal, to hell with the medals, and I mean it. You know the poor, little elfin girls who become the best gymnasts? Have you ever seen even one of those kids smile after a routine, no matter how good they were? They look unhappier than Bob Novak at a Trees for Israel dinner. We’re lucky they don’t open up their wrists. Folks, I don’t care whether it’s the Winter Olympics, the Summer Olympics, the Good Will Games, or the Ice Capades, any activity whose greatest competitors have to be stick-thin, sallow, distraught, and incapable of ever menstruating is not a sport. It’s a felony. Or it ought to be. Period. (So to speak.) At least the male skiers seem to have a lighter attitude even when they wipe out. Perhaps that’s because they know the lines of girls they left outside their rooms will be even longer when they return.
A couple of Sundays ago, my wife and I took our kids to their school for a carnival, because we’re just not there enough during the week, and one of them actually won a goldfish by tossing a ping-pong ball into a tiny fishbowl from about twenty feet. Good enough so far. Everyone cheered, and they gave him the fish, and the volunteer-mother running the booth bent down with a big smile and gushed, “Too bad this isn’t an event in the Olympics!” And I said, “Don’t worry. It will be.” The whole place went silent, and my wife shot me a Darth Vader look (not her first). And as we walked away you could hear the whispers. “There he goes, the crabby Olympics-hater who keeps asking us why we won’t teach about George Washington.”
That’s me all right. Come on in. The water’s fine.
Larry Miller is a contributing humorist to The Daily Standard and a writer, actor, and comedian living in Los Angeles.
