Dumb Stuff I've Seen Watching The Olympics

One of the truly upsetting things about not having a laptop for the past two weeks (besides the lack of porn) is that I have not been able to comment in my borderline amusing way about the Olympics. Thanks largely to Neil, I’ve watched hours more of the Olympics than I had planned.

Admittedly, I had planned to watch 0 hours.

But I have been sucked in to some extent. With seven Olympic channels on Dish Network all in glorious HighDef, it’s easy to get sucked.

But let’s be honest. The Olympics are boring.

There are three kinds of “sports” I’ve got not one gram of interest in watching – hobbies (ping pong, equestrian, fencing), races and anything judged (especially anything prefaced with rhythmic or synchronized). And this is essentially the Olympics. Yeah, I guess the swimming stuff could be exciting, as well as that Bolt dude. But races have no strategy or defense and are thus not of any interest to me. And as anyone who has ever seen me play Ultimate knows, I’m all about defense.

But there is one thing I do love about the Olympics – the random dumb sport you only see during the Olympics. And there is no dumber or randomer sport than Race Walking.

Now, if I may digress. I have always wondered what would happen if a great athlete like a Michael Jordan or a TO Owens would have turned their attentions toward a “lesser” sport like swimming or cycling. With an influx of great athletes, the lesser swimmers and cyclists would be pushed out of their sports and they would have to find something new they could dominate or nearly dominate. Ultimately, and yes Ultimate would be effect by this, a large group of “athletes” would be pushed down to Race Walking.

By the way, I’m not suggesting that a Lance Armstrong or Michael Phelps would be pushed out. But the “journeyman” swimmer or cyclist would.

So somehow I was surfing the Dish last night and happened across the Men’s 50K Race Walking event. Doing that quick math, that’s longer than a marathon, and these dudes are going to walk it. Now that’s some kickass TV, 3 ½ hours of watching guys walk around like a duck. My favorite moment (and I only watched for five minutes before passing out) was at the 20 second mark, some dude looks down at his watch. I would imagine there’s a lot of that. “Jesus Christ how much time is left. WHAT?!?! It’s only been 20 seconds. Good Christ someone shoot me.”

Oh, and for those looking to get Ultimate into the Olympics. Well, it will never happen. There’s no way a world class Ultimate player could ever pass a drug test.