Bret the Speed Skater

Hey, cool. I didn't realize that Bret McKenzie moved from New Zealand to Canada and became an Olympic speed skater.

He should have worn his hair helmet.

Trying to Make Sense of Gymnastics

There are some athletic competitions which just inherently make sense to me. I like knowing, for example, who is the gold medal winner of the 100m sprint (this year, it's Usain Bolt) because that's a skill I understand: he's the fastest human on Earth. If we line up every person in the world and have a race, Bolt wins. The same concept applies to the World's Strongest Man (Mariusz Pudzianowski) because he's, well, the world's strongest man, and to the heavyweight boxing champion of the world (there are five regulating bodies in boxing, which currently have split their champion awards to three different dudes) because he could win a fight with anyone in the world.

But I don't know how to think of gymnastics. It's a skill-set which is so far from being functional in any way that I have a hard time contextualizing it.

Luckily, the FreeDarko guys have been thinking and talking about the same thing (sorta), and since they're way smarter than I am, you should go read what they have to say.

Here, though, is the money quote:

The difference for me is that gymnastics requires such specialized training that the indirectness of usefulness that you talk about here confuses the hell out of me. The idea that someone would train to do leg spins (for the love of Strugg, I hope there's a technical term for these) around a block with hand-holds for a good minute or so, and then pin the outcome of all that training on arbitrary judging that's accepted as corrupt makes no sense to me.

The obvious response to this is that the NBA has arbitrary rules and some corruption in its ranks (donaghy lolz!), so maybe we just accept that ridiculousness because the athletes get paid a lot and enough people watch the games to make it less of an outsider activity. But, really, I think the particulars of a sport like basketball (or baseball, or most of all football) are so ridiculously defined (seriously, I had to explain an onside kick to British people at a Niners game last year and they just laughed at me) that they actually seem more acceptable to us as viewers. So many arbitrary things happen in a basketball play with regards to players respecting and disrespecting rules, aiming for the goals defined by the rules, etc that we can only make sense of it by submitting fully to its skewed logic.

There's a huge difference in something like gymnastics -- at least for a relatively ignorant fan like me -- in that the movements seem more like bizarre revelations of ability rather than a submission to another plane of logic. Like, when I watch the best basketball players, I think "they're good at basketball" -- when I watch the best gymnasts, I think "these dudes are rocks -- why are they jumping on mats and not working as freelance ninjas?" Basically, I think gymnastics rests in this uncanny valley on the graph of sports ridiculousness right between "so basic that it works" (e.g. track and field) and "so complicated that it works."

A More Thoughtful Post About The Olympics

Probably the best basketball-themed blog in existence is something called FreeDarko. The site's name derives from those first few seasons (from like 2003-'04) of Mr. Darko Milicic's NBA career, when this purportedly supremely talented Serbian basketballer was chained to the bench while his teammates went on to win a championship with basically minimal help from the big white dude named Darko. The founders of the site have created an entirely new aesthetic of basketball--and they've nearly left Darko in the dust, because it turns out that he sucks--and there's just about a weekly post trying to define the true meaning of FreeDarko-ness. They're pretty much the most original basketball thinkers I've ever read, and the cool thing is that their innovation isn't related to basketball strategy or anything having to do with playing the game; it's innovation in the realm of being a fan. In short, they think critically about sports, refusing to just blindly root for laundry.

Here's a thought mentioned briefly by site founder Bethlehem Shoals (not his real name, but a fellow Jew):

I hope no one freaks out and kills me over this, but I can't help but feel like the Olympics are totally 9/11. That's the last time I felt compelled to sit in front of the television as if marathon spectatorship were a meaningful act. A lifestyle, even.

Carter Blanchard, a frequent contributor to the site, elaborates thus in the comments:

A friend of mine has a theory that these are the first Olympics that feel relevant to him, because, he thinks, they're the first in which our athletic/economic/political/moral superiority feels in doubt. I think more accurately it might be the first for which we're aware of vulnerabilities that have always been there, but regardless, I think this somehow ties in with Shoals' 9/11 point. They must be watched. And frogs must be humbled.

As I've mentioned already, it's been a good twelve years since I've watched the Olympics. Do these feel any different to anyone else? My mom, for example, isn't much of a sports-enthuasiast, but even she got mildly pumped up during the creepy girls gymnastics last night. Are we reassuring ourselves through Michael Phelps?

Olympic Fever May, In Fact, Be Avian Flu

One of the hazards of spending twelve straight summers (including my first three ever at Camp Nesher) in camps (Moshava is the other, more obvious one) of the sleeping-away variety is that you miss out on the sometimes scary jingoism and fluff-style athletic news pieces which mark the start of the Summer Olympics. The other two hazards I have in mind are 1) going more than a decade without seeing baseball's All-Star Game and 2) thinking that Tisha B'Av everywhere is a solemn and meaningful day, when, in fact, most of the solemnity and meaning are drained of the day if it is spent in O'Hare International Airport for a hour-long stopover which somehow morphes--in 47 minutes intervals--into a four-hour waiting game during which you hungrily watch as many episodes of The Simpons as your poor laptop battery can handle on (in?) it's last day before retirement.

Now, normally, there's scant little I like less than sometimes scary jingoism and fluff-style athletic news pieces. And I still don't have any patience for these things. I keep wanting to turn the volume down on the TV so that I don't have to listen to the announcer describe how sad Misty May-Treanor was when her mom died and how she (Misty) remembers her (Misty's mom) with the tattoo on her shoulder, but how also this loss led her to realize the nature of real loss teaching her to not take so seriously and personally the losses on the beach volleyball court. That type of meaningless commentary doesn't make me want to keep watching. If there's one thing sports doesn't need, it's this Oprahization of competition. I liked watching (the next morning on the internet, of course, because even in Publishing Camp they don't have TV's all over the place) Josh Hamilton knock the living crap out of the ball at the home-run derby because it was freakishly good hitting; his struggles with drugs didn't make that any cooler.

That said, I get a real kick out of watching sports we used to play in 7th grade gym class being played by world-class athletes. I could seriously go for some water-polo or European hand-ball. It's nice background noise for the summer.

And for everyone out there thinking to him-/her-self, "Y'know, with just a few years of training, I could do those flips that all those shortish scary guys are doing on TV," you should read this first.

UPDATE: Just watched some of the women's gymnastics, and, hoo-boy, that stuff is creepy. Those girls are so small.