Your Olympic Spirit Quizo Update

When I got home from my last day at the Death Star factory on Friday, I was a little bummed until I remembered that, hey! It's the first day of the Olympics!

I am a stupidly big fan of the Olympics. They say that the Olympics are sports for people who don't really watch sports, but I say, "screw that noise." I love the Olympics. It very nicely fits in with the gorging, hoovering way in which I consume entertainment. You really cannot underestimate the awesomeness of being able to essentially do nothing but watch sports for 16 days straight, and now with my days suddenly, shall we say, much more wide-open and NBC's multi-channel 24/7 coverage I can do precisely that.

Plus you get to discover all kinds of neat things in the process. Watching the US Women's National Team at the Olympics was what originally got me interested in soccer - thanks for that, ladies - and this weekend I discovered "team handball." If you haven't seen it, team handball is best described as either "soccer with hands" or "lacrosse without sticks." When you first start watching it you think it's kinda stupid, but then the more you watch you realize it's actually pretty damned cool.

There is, however, a downside to these weeks of decadent sports consumption.

While I love the Olympics, I hate - hate hate motherfucking HATE - human interest stories (possibly because, as a number of my exes have suggested, I may not be human). And that's under normal, non-Olympic conditions. During the Olympics the prevalence of these mind-numbing tales soars to unthinkable levels and I feel a distinct urge to murder something every time an Olympic announcer starts talking about the heartwarming (occasionally heartbreaking) story of Steve Grabowski's rise to OH SWEET MERCIFUL CHRIST I'M GOING TO THROW A ROCK THROUGH MY GODDAMN TELEVISION. This shit is not what I came to watch. I came to watch people throw javelins and swim really fast and crap like that. I don't care how they got there. I DON'T FUCKING CARE. Worse still, I don't know anyone who does. Have you ever been watching the Olympics (or in fact any sporting event) with people, and when the stirring music (which used to be, I am not making this up, the theme song from The Adventures of Brisco County Jr) someone says, "hey, shut up man, I wanna hear this guy's life story?" No. Of course not. No one ever has. This is what causes the "sports for people who don't watch sports" criticism, and whoever thought "this is how we should cover the Olympics" should be shot, then drawn and quartered, then tarred and feathered, then shot again for good measure.

I have really grown to hate these bits of "the athlete's story" during the coverage. I mean, seriously, the worst hack writer in Hollywood couldn't churn out melodrama like this if their life depended on it. If the sports media, and especially NBC, is to be believed every single athlete at the Games has had to endure senses-shattering hardship to reach their shot at Olympic glory:

"Johann Jones' road to the triathlon was a rocky one. Born without arms, legs, or a sense of smell, he spent his first fourteen years in a specially-designed propulsion pod that allowed him to move around and feed himself through a complex series of eyelid-operated mechanical arms. On his fourteenth birthday he began the perilous trek up Mount Everest to meet the mystic who, it was claimed, could teach him an ancient Eastern method of limb regeneration, but because the Nepalese government refused him a permit, he had to climb the mountain without the use of his pod. So Johann spent a grueling 9 weeks ascending the tallest mountain in the world, pulling himself six inches a time with his tongue. When he reached the top the mystic taught him how to grow new arms and legs, but the limbs were weak and flimsy and the bones in them would break in a stiff breeze, so he spent the next four years of his life learning how to walk and eat and turn pages of books inside a special wind-free warehouse outside Area 51 where the only human contact he could have was via webcam with his fiancee, a heroin-addicted ex-prostitute he met at a bus terminal who gave up her life of sin after taking a shine to a poor disabled boy... with dreams of Olympic gold."

Then, as if that weren't enough to drive a normal person to depths of insanity that would make Hannibal Lecter sit back and say, "hmm, interesting," comes the buildup just before the event itself, which only becomes bearable when the story completely breaks down as the athletes in question fall flat on their faces.

"Can this young man, who has already broken his own world records three times in this event, fulfill his Olympic dream today, his birthday? If he wins the moon will be renamed in his honor, the European Union will disband and make him the leader of a new Holy Roman Empire, and after his coronation he will be treated to wild sex orgies with the Russian Women's Tennis team twice a day, and... oh... er... guess he'll have to settle for the bronze, there, Bob."

The weight of expectation is a terrible thing, folks.

And it wouldn't be so bad, I suppose, if these stories which populate every possible interstitial second of, you know, ACTUAL FUCKING SPORTS weren't an obvious anomaly. Especially when the reality is that most Olympic athletes' stories are more along the lines of:

"Cloned from the cells of Bruce Jenner and Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Sven lived in an Olympic Athlete Training and Body Perfection Compound until he was thirteen, where he trained in every possible endeavor of human physicality in a strength and endurance regimen that kills nine-tenths of those who begin it - fifty percent of whom perish before they are six years old. By the age of fourteen he was a perfect physical specimen who repeatedly defeated both Batman AND Captain America in virtual-reality scenarios designed to push the human body to punishing limits and beyond. After graduating the compound he was handed over to Darth Bane who would teach him the finer points of the hammer throw, the event he was genetically-engineered to destroy every existing world record in, while training Sven to become a Dark Lord of the Sith. His limbs and organs were replaced with bionic devices that allow him to bench press 1400 pounds and run a 90-second mile, and his blood has been replaced with a substance we are told is not unlike motor oil, which both provides critical cooling to his mechanical parts but also keeps his new gel-circuitry techno-brain, capable of processing over 14 quadrillion calculations per second, well-lubricated. Suffice it to say, Bob, this should be an easy event for Sven when you consider that he can not only use his barely-human body and telekinesis to add dozens of meters to his throws, but also has the ability to cripple his opponents with Force lightning."

You know, now that I think about it, I wouldn't mind these stupid human-interest stories so much if they'd make lightsaber combat an Olympic sport.

JLK