They see what they want to see
You should have never been born
You’d better stay with me
John
Hiatt 1979
I am proud to say
that I took my Olympic watching this year to an entirely new level of
obsessiveness. First midnight, then 1:00 A.M., and by the end I was going to
bed at about the same time my wife wakes up in the morning. Watching the
Olympics on TV should itself be an Olympic sport. Which brings me to my topic
tonight: if I was King, which sports would be eliminated from the Olympics.
I've come up with a
quick, easy system to determine this:
1) Any sport where the winner is determined 100% of the time by a referee's opinion has got to be cut. If there is no objective way to determine who won or lost (like points scored, fastest time, weight lifted, height vaulted, etc.), it has to go. So say goodbye to diving (sort of interesting, actually), synchronized swimming (still hilarious, even after all these years), and gymnastics (the older I get the more I can't stand this sport. I realize I'm a minority here).
We’ll still keep the
sports that can go to a judge's decision, but don't have to, like boxing. You
can always knock the guy unconscious and not leave it up to a judge. There's
always that.
2) You can’t have any sport in the Olympics that is a young kids’ game. Did you know that trampoline is an Olympic sport? No, seriously. There's a reason that the Olympics got rid of tug-of-war, which in the early 1900s was an Olympic sport (I'm not kidding, look it up).
3) We’re only going to keep sports in which the athletes have to excel in at least one of the following traits: Speed, jumping, or strength. The latter allows us to keep weightlifting, even if most of the athletes appear to be clinically obese. The corollary to this is we will only keep sports in which you actually sweat. Say goodbye to equestrian (beautiful, but give me a break), archery (actually cool looking, did you get a chance to see what a modern day bow looks like?), and air rifle.
As an aside, you
know a quick way to make the last two sports the top-rated in the Olympics?
Combine the two, let loose a totally random animal for each competitor, and
call the sport “hunting". Come on, you know you would watch this.
(Please, no hate mail,
I'm just kidding. Did I mention that I go to the zoo with my kids every month?)
So there are the
rules. This does not mean that the sports eliminated are not fun, cool, or
interesting. My favorite show of all time was “O” by Cirque de Soleil in Las Vegas.
I think this type of venue is more appropriate for the sports that did not make
the cut. Similarly, I would love to go watch the best archer in the world and
predict whether she's a better shot than the girl from Hunger Games. Just don't
call it an Olympic sport.
But since I'm not
king, I guess we'll just get more of this.
Have a good night
everyone.
JR
