2/20/2006

TEN RANDOM THOUGHTS, OLYMPIC EDITION

  1. Curling is the Munchos of Olympic sports: Everyone agrees it sounds (and ought to be) horrible, but you just can’t tear yourself away. I’ve heard gobs of people say they find the curling strangely compelling–as do I.
  2. In terms of absolute flapjack lunacy, it’s a close call between the ski jumpers and the skeleton racers. The ski jumpers practice a controlled fall at a distance and speeds that would kill just about anyone, but the skeleton racers fly down an ice-encased concrete mail chute head-first at 80 MPH. Hemingway would say these are both real sports.
  3. But Bryant Gumbel wouldn’t, of course.
  4. The Chevy ad with the SUVs on top of the mountains with their horns bleating out the Olympic theme just reminds you that there are some places motorized vehicles ought not be allowed to go, ever. And is there anybody dense enough to think that those SUVs got to the mountaintops under their own power? If so, they’re probably the same folk who think the NASCAR Monte Carlo and the showroom version have anything in common besides a name.
  5. By the way, I am a Bodeist: I, too, have wasted alarming quantities of Nike’s marketing money. They’ve been advertising to me for 20 years and I have yet to buy anything with a swoosh on it.
  6. It’s time we all faced reality: 1980 was probably the last moment ever of US Olympic men’s hockey glory.
  7. If two-man luge jokes were your license tags, you’d get pulled over.
  8. Isn’t it amazing how Jerome Bettis just happened to be in Torino last night so they could announce he’s joining NBC’s NFL broadcast team? I mean, what are the odds? And will NBC pay the CBC royalties for the name “Football Night In America”?
  9. OK, I think the real reason so many people are wrapped up in the curling (Wrapped! Curling! HA! I amuse myself!) is because it’s the only Olympic sport we look at and think, “You know, I could maybe do that.”
  10. But in the whole realm of Sports You’d Rather Not Have People See You Attempting, it’s a close call between classical cross-country skiing and racewalking.
Posted by Mark @ 9:53 pm | | Permalink
This post is filed under: Sports & Lists

5 Comments »

  1. My fascination with curling began about midway through the match between the US women and Switzerland??? on Saturday, when I stopping thinking how stupid it looked and actually looked at the rules. It got much more interesting then. Now I’m disappointed that it’s over.

    Comment by Harry — 2/21/2006 @ 3:07 pm

  2. Curling isn’t over yet. Playoffs start tomorrow, I think.

    I like curling — I watch it when it’s on CBC. But the one I’ve really taken a shine to this Olympics is biathlon. Ski. Shoot. Miss, you have to do penalty laps. Repeat.

    I was thinking that crossing other sports with target shooting would actually be pretty cool. Cycle 20km, shoot, repeat.

    Comment by dw — 2/21/2006 @ 5:28 pm

  3. Sure, Dylan - what you’re hoping for is biathlon with ice dancers as the targets.

    Comment by Harry — 2/22/2006 @ 8:10 am

  4. I live in Michicanuckia, so I’ve been watching curling for a couple decades now on CBC.

    A wonderfully simple game, and the pinnacle of sportsmanship- no refs, the scoring is done by the captains of the teams. So long as they agree on the score of an end, that’s the score. If one of them says he can’t tell, they bring out a stick and measure. And the stick determines the score.

    As a late sleeper, I often find myself in bed at about noon when the curling starts on CBC every saturday. And I find myself staying in bed and watching it for about another 1.5 hours… Fascinating stuff.

    Comment by gozer — 2/24/2006 @ 1:25 am

  5. Wow, I guess it’s been nearly a full week since I’ve visited …
    Two things:
    1) ‘Tis the season … I felt the urge to go rent “Miracle” Tues. night from my favorite mid-major-size mom-and-pop video store, for the first time since the one time I’d seen the film in a theater. There were six or eight copies in the store’s general DVD Drama section (about half full-screen, but gotta go wide), and they were all closely compacted by other titles on both ends.
    Suggesting, of course, that no one else had any of the store’s copies of “Miracle” out at the time I got there. How is that possible for a well-established video store, during a Winter Olympics and at a time when it was clear that Team USA probably wouldn’t come close to medaling this year? And don’t talk to me about online rental services; I rent videos away from home for the same reason I don’t shop from my computer - I like to get out of the house.
    2) C’mon, with the whole Bettis thing, NBC was really only doing the kind of self-promoting of its programming that FOX has been doing repeatedly through years and years of baseball playoffs. Hey, isn’t that Topher Grace? How’d he finagle a seat? Let’s put him on camera!

    Comment by Paul — 2/25/2006 @ 11:00 pm

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