The Crying Games

Lately there's been a lot of news coming out of China, and most of it, either directly or indirectly, is linked to the fact that China is hosting the Summer Olympics next summer. And this made me think about how much the Olympics suck to watch on TV.

One of the guy networks like ESPN has to broadcast an old-school version of the Olympics that leaves out all the "Hallmark Moments" and just shows sports.


Adolf Hitler once used the Olympics to demonstrate that Aryans were strong; NBC uses them to show the world that Americans like to cry a lot. Look, I understand that everything nowadays has to be rendered bloated, syrupy, dumbed down, and sentimental--this is America, after all. But for those of you out there who may be too young to remember a time before Oprah ruined everything: in the old days when we watched the Olympics, it wasn't continuous sob-sister profiles interrupted by the occasioal sporting event, it was just the events. There was none of this stuff about the heartbreak and pain it took to become the best damn kayaker a man can be. It was enough just to watch a man throw a long stick or a big iron ball. His mom's chemotherapy, his sister's glass eye, and his dog, a wounded combat vet--they never entered into it. We weren't told whose grandpa was paralyzed in a tractor accident or that the decathlon guy has a cleft palate and overcame a lifetime of bed-wetting to go for the gold, because if someone had told us that, we would have said, "Hey, if I wanted to sit through hours of melodramatic personal backstory, I'd pay attention to my date."

Take Nancy Pitts of the US women's wrestling team. A few years ago, the unthinkable happened to Nancy--she was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Happily, it was caught in time, and she was able to go back to her usual training regimen: 3 hours of weight lifting, followed by an hour of shaving.

The Olympic Games are that rarest of events, a coalition of a great variety of nations coming together for a purpose other than killing Iraqis. So please, media barons, just give us one channel where it's simply about the competition and the belief that how high a man can jump is also a measurement of who has the best country.

Lak