At some point almost every night, Jeff and I watch a bit of the Olympics. Most of the time we find ourselves either marveling that the sport we're watching is considered an Olympic sport or wondering just exactly how whatever sport we're watching works.
An example of a sport that would fit into Category A is Snowboard Cross. So baseball and softball aren't good enough for the Olympics but Snowboard Cross is? In case you haven't watched, Snowboard Cross is an event where 4 snowboarders at a time race down a track, all the while trying to cut each other off and knock each other out of the race. It's kind of like Motorcross on a Snowboard. It's slightly interesting at moments, but it's really not a very noble or grand sport. It also doesn't have that thrill of racing where one competitor beats another by a hundredth of a second. In fact, in most races, at least one or two of the competitors were knocked off the course and out of the race well before the midpoint of the course. It's totally X-Games material, and I'm not quite sure how it became or why it's considered an Olympic sport. (The showboating that cost Jacobellis the gold is a pretty good example of how X-Games it is.)
An example of a sport that would fit into Category B is Ice Dancing. No one really seems to know exactly how Ice Dancing is scored. Scott Hamill, a former iceskater, even admitted that he had no clue how it worked. The only things we figured out for certain was that unison is good and hand-holds are just too easy. I'm not sure what other types of holds there are and why they are better, but I did hear over and over that teams just weren't of that high caliber when they kept using hand-holds. Whatever. I have no idea. But we won a silver medal in it, so yay for us.
There are plenty of other sports that fall into one or both of these categories. Curling (aka shuffleboard on ice), for instance. Seriously, this is an Olympic Sport? It doesn't seem very athletic to me at all. In fact, I think anyone dedicated enough could probably become a good curler. I don't think that's true of most sports where natural ability plays a big part. In curling, I think it's all about being bored enough to continuously do that over and over until you're good at it. And what's up with Nordic Combined? Why are ski jumping and cross country skiing paired together to make up a sport? It's like they didn't have enough events, so they paired up two completely random ones and called it a new one. Why not combine platform diving and marathon running for the Summer Games? Just weird.
I'm not at all surprised that the Games aren't getting very good ratings. They're really not very exciting. All the athletes I heard about pre-Olympics seem to be pretty overrated (Bode Miller, for example), and none of the events really command your attention. We just watch it for the simply job of marveling over the ridiculousness of it. Go USA!
2 comments:
But you forgot the actual good sports. Those cross-country skiers are insane, who first decided to jump off a sk jump?, and that speedskating relay was insane. But yeah, these aren't very exciting. There is not enough swiching of positions. Someone takes the lead and thats it. Boo, i need some suspense and action.
I watched Nordic Combined on the first day of the Games and had the same thought. And from what the announcers were saying it sounded like the participants were good at either jumping or skiing but not both. So in the end the best skiers only needed 'OK' jumps to be in contention and win it all.
Post a Comment