“A casual relationship with reality”
Categories: Television
For someone nat that into sports, I really like the Olympics, both winter and summer (though only certain events). Basically I've figured out that I pretty much like the sports where people fly through the air: basketball, pretty much everything at the X Games, beach volleyball (well, women's beach volleyball). So naturally there's a lot in the Winter Olympics that I dig, especially now that they added snowboarding.
And as for snowboarding, man you gotta be impressed with Shaun White. He's got 6 Gold Medals in the X Games (including gold in Superpipe for the last four winters) and now a Gold medal in the Winter Olympics. He's not even old enough to drink.
Anyhow, so since I like the fly-through-the-air sports, I obviously dig the figure skating as much as the next person. But it's funny I forget this in the non-Olympic years: I hate Dick Button.
I mean, it's bad enough that he thinks his job is to talk for as long as possible, regardless of relevance, coherence, sentence structure or what the skater is actually doing at the time. I know they pay the commentators to talk, but just shut the hell up if you don't actually have something relevant to add. I mean, cheesy as they are, the end of a skater's performance is meant to be dramatic, why don't you just wait for the damn music to end before jumping in with a rambling and redundant line of incomprehensible jive?
"Redundant" is really the active word in that sentence. Here's a typical Dick Button blah blah: "Well, it just didn't flow for me, the transitions didn't gel, it wasn't very well connected, like it was just one jump then another, no flow, it never really held together." Gee, thanks Dick!
Of course, redundancy is like NBC's watchword. Apparently, the new Figure Skating scoring system allows you to build up points. And apparently Georg Hackel makes his own Luge sleds. Oh, and did you hear that Michelle Kwan withdrew or something? Also, Georg Hackel makes his own Luge sleds. That makes him special.
Anyhow, it turns out there's a non-airborne event I really dig, and that's Short Track Speed Skating. I never really got into regular Speed Skating, because like Luge, Skeleton and most of the other various races, if you've seen one speed skating race, you've seen them all*. But Short Track is totally the opposite: Half the field can wipe out in a crash on the first turn. The pressure to pass and the few seconds racers have to do it in mean they have to take big risks or settle for something other than gold. I started watching it (like everyone else) in the 2002 Winter games, and I've been looking forward to short track so much that I was worried that it wasn't as cool as I remembered. But it is! I mean my adrenaline really gets pumping watching this.
Now, if they could just figure out a way to get people to fly through the air in Short Track.
* And what the hell is the Biathlon about? Cross-Country + Shooting: The sport of Soviet border guards.
posted by Mark Kawakami at February 16, 2006, 12:02 AM // permalink // (13) Comments