Enough Olympics

I'm through with the Olympics.

If you're not really into rooting for your country to win (whatever that even means), there are three ways the Games can make you feel:

1. Numbly awed (by the physical attainments of kids who've devoted their lives to rotely drilling the same moves over and over and over, and who now perform those moves in a state of highly contagious anxiety and terror),

2. Disconsolate (watching the anguish of kids who've devoted their lives to rotely drilling the same moves over and over and over who happen to sneeze or wobble this particular time, making it all for naught), or...

3. Inspired (by talented athletes performing in a state of transcendent joy...as a palpable expression of love for what they do, rather than a creepy merging of naked ambition and robotic dehumanization).

The problem is that there's not much #3 happening.

Anyway, I just had my heart broken watching little Cheng Fei burst into bitter tears after some stray impulse landed her on her bum amid an otherwise flawless execution of a series of essentially meaningless super-difficult maneuvers. That, in turn, came after little Alicia Sacramone was bitterly tearful after being shut out of a vaulting medal when Cheng Fei's landing bauble was deigned less significant than her's. Which took place after a Brazilian man performed a floor routine with a galvanizing grace that achieved result #3, but who suddenly lost it and fell-down-went-boom, and a Brazilian woman performed a sublimely ecstatic floor routine that merited no consideration at all because her foot went outside the line ("That sure was energetic," was all the commentator could say). God bless Brazil, which, naturally, has never medaled in this event. The man's shattered face, relentlessly pursued by NBC's shameless, merciless cameramen, will continue to haunt me.

Gymnastics and diving are like piano competitions, where all glory goes to whoever commits the fewest errors. It's an aesthetically repulsive framework, more befitting of a factory assembly line than any sort of noble human achievement. And for those of us following along, it's like watching NASCAR, where the "entertainment" is in the wrecks (hence the insatiable thirst of those cameramen for teary money shots).

There are people whose lives are so grimly numb that only via voyeuristic identification with crashing cars and inconsolable kids can they can feel anything. And there are people more impressed by cold perfection than by raw, real, flawed beauty.

Me? I've come to realize that the Olympics is all downside. Cold rote perfection does little for me, but watching kids have their dreams crushed feels like the worst kind of torture. I can't understand why I've been giving this four hours of my nightly attention.