From the New York Times, “Creep Show” by Buzz Bissinger Buzz hates the Olympics even more than I do! As you may know, Bissinger is the author of the seminal fly-on-the-wall sports book, Friday Night Lights. Friday Night Lights was a searing look at the world of high stakes high school football as it’s played in Texas. Personally, I always found it a great but flawed work. While Bissinger captured the many problems of big time high school football, he took little notice of the heroism and nobility that was also a part of the endeavor. While the heroism was admittedly a lesser part of the scene, it nonetheless was part of the scene but not a significant part of the book. (While we’re sort of on the subject, if you want to read the best fly-on-the-wall sports book ever written, I commend to you the little-noticed Bringing the Heat by Blackhawk Down author Mark Bowden. Read it – you’ll thank me.) In his searing column on the Olympics and especially the many obscenities associated with pixie gymnastics, Bissinger’s aim is truer:
Since I have already gone on record with a Times Op-Ed article in April saying the games should be banned entirely because of their incontrovertible history of corruption and politicizing, I know I shouldn’t watch. But given my abiding interest in the bizarre spectacle that I call SportsWorld, I won’t be able to entirely ignore the endless soap operas… I will watch the enormously popular women’s gymnastics competition. The performances are incredible and fearless, but it isn’t the athleticism that draws me in. In fact I can’t think of any competition in the Olympics, or all of SportsWorld, more creepy and disturbing: these largely shapeless girls in their leotards and flaxen-waxen hair and bouncy-wouncy ponytails. “They look like girls from the neck up,” I was told by Joan Ryan, whose 1995 book, “Little Girls in Pretty Boxes,” blew a sky-high lid off the sadomasochistic training regimens that young female gymnasts were being subjected to. She continued: “From the neck down they look like prepubescent boys.” During the Olympics, when a female gymnast finishes an event and hugs her coach, often a man three times her age, I cringe at what I believe is the unsavory stench of the sport in general – children under the wing of men who based on lengthy documentation have proven to be abusive, relentless, intolerant, humiliating and, in some instances, accused of sexual misconduct. “These girls will do anything for these guys,” Ms. Ryan told me. “They have such control over them.”
Read the whole thing, and add it to the ever burgeoning file of things about the Olympics that are truly vomitous.
