Tuesday, August 17, 2004
Weightlifting and Lap Dancing
After putting a rather large rip on the Summer Olympics last Thursday, I ended up watching great swaths of it over the weekend after all. We were visiting friends whose daughter is a swimmer, and who knows some of the U.S. team members (and who once loaned her swim goggles to Michael Phelps just before a race), so we got an insider's perspective on competitive swimming. We also watched lots of other events. Some observations:
Best Bumper Sticker of the Weekend: Spotted at a tollbooth in Illinois--"Practice Abstinence. No Bush, No Dick in 2004."
After putting a rather large rip on the Summer Olympics last Thursday, I ended up watching great swaths of it over the weekend after all. We were visiting friends whose daughter is a swimmer, and who knows some of the U.S. team members (and who once loaned her swim goggles to Michael Phelps just before a race), so we got an insider's perspective on competitive swimming. We also watched lots of other events. Some observations:
If your name is your destiny, NBC's gymnastics commentator Elfi Schlegel could have done nothing else with her life.Recommended Reading: Over at The American Prospect, Tapped was rockin' yesterday, with a report on how the Washington Times is trying to revive the WMD story by claming that they're in Syria after all; a report on the dramatic scene when Louisiana Congressman Rodney Alexander's wife confronted his staffers after her husband’s craven switch to the Republican Party; and some great stuff on the smacking-down of Laura Bush’s recent comments on stem cells, and how her husband keeps saying he "understands the stakes" of the war on terror without actually giving evidence that he knows what they are.
I know that the NBA stars on the U.S. men's basketball team don't stay in the Olympic Village with the rest of the athletes, but I have this fantasy in which Allen Iverson meets a 123-pound female weightlifter from Indonesia in the cafeteria and gets his ass kicked. Maybe it'd wipe that thousand-mile gangster stare off his face, which he wore even during the parade of nations during the opening ceremonies.
Speaking of weightlifting, there are two main types—-the snatch, in which the weight must be lifted in a single motion, and the clean and jerk, in which the weight is lifted to the shoulders and then overhead. But should women really be participating in something called the snatch?
Badminton will never make it as a televised sport, not even with the legendary sportscaster Don Chevrier on the call. But at least it’s a sport. Beach volleyball, I have decided, is not a sport. (As sportswriter Bernie Lincicome says, "This sport resembles regular volleyball in the same way that lap dancing resembles the polka.") Neither are synchronized swimming or rhythmic gymnastics. (Lincicome: "Little girls with ribbons. They also have hoops and ropes and balls and clubs. No one knows why.") I am not sure whether synchronized diving is a sport—-but I do know that the woman doing commentary on it for NBC has yet to see a dive that didn't disappoint her.
Best Bumper Sticker of the Weekend: Spotted at a tollbooth in Illinois--"Practice Abstinence. No Bush, No Dick in 2004."
