Dropping the Deuce on… The 2010 Winter Olympics

I don’t care what other’s opinions are, but the Winter Olympics have absolutely nothing I want to watch and the rest of television is suffering in a spiral of re-runs because of it. I’m not saying that none of those events are worthy of medals or should not be considered Olympic events, I’m just saying none of those events interest me enough to commit time to watch. I’ll admit that 99% of the competitions are impossible for me to do even in a leisurely manner, but maybe that’s a reason for why I don’t watch them. I can dream about hitting a buzzer beater in a basketball game or hitting in the game-winning run in baseball, but I can’t imagine myself doing a triple axel spin for the gold or getting big air on the giant slalom.

The X-Game type of events, like snowboarding, ski jumps, etc., never made me care about who’s on top or who’s involved. I used to watch figure skating when there was that whole Nancy Kerrigan “Why me?” drama, but that quickly died down when she got the silver medal. And when it comes to hockey, I take the Rodney Dangerfield perspective. “I went to watch a fight and a hockey game broke out.” Not my sport.

The only solace I thought I would get from the whole Olympics experience would be the opening ceremony. The 2008 opening ceremony in Beijing kicked ass. I almost had a seizure from all of the colors and lights. Maybe they set the bar too high for Canada, because I was totally unimpressed. Well, let me scale that back. There were the cool lighting effects they had on the ground like when they had images of whales swimming by and the ground actually squirted out water from their spouts at the right moments. But everything else was underwhelming. I should have immediately lowered my standards when Bob Costas mentioned that the budget compared to Beijing was a fraction of it and that the coordinator wanted to focus on an individual instead of an entire nation. I would have bought it on paper, but when I actually saw it TV, I was not impressed. It was nice that they dedicated the opening ceremony to the luger that died before the games started, but after that, I didn’t want to have to sit through a 10 minute video of a dude snowboarding down a mountain. Oh and the finale was complete laugh riot where the fourth column of the Olympics pyre wouldn’t come up so they had four of Canada’s proudest athletes just standing near the end of the ceremony with forced and uncomfortable grins while their eyes are darting in every direction wondering what the heck they were supposed to do. Unfortunately, my DVR had stopped recording before they actually lit the fire. That’s right. I didn’t even watch that live. I was too busy getting my car towed.

I used to hear friends of mine say that the whole Olympics are corrupt and unsafe. I used to brush them off like crazy statements I could hear on the street corner of a seedy neighborhood, but after the death of the luger, they definitely got me wondering about the safety aspect. I saw the footage of the crash. It was just terrible. Then I saw the precautions they took after the fact and just shook my head in disappointment. They built up a thin wood barrier on the wall that the luger flew over and they are making the lugers start at a lower point to decrease their speeds. For some reason, I was expecting something more professional looking than a sore thumb wooden board held up by planks. Sure, it would probably do the job since I think most of the danger is subsided by just keeping the athletes from flying out of the course and into the poles, but the pictures I saw just seemed half-assed to appease the outraged world. The wooden board was a good start, but I would have also put padding on all of the poles in case they flew right through that wall and showed EMTs at every “danger zone” of the course. Are the EMTs over-zealous? Maybe, but I wouldn’t risk a life just because it seems to be overdoing things. Also, the Olympic committee did a total douche bag move by blaming the death on the luger himself because of he made a steering miscalculation. Sure he wasn’t probably wasn’t the best in the world, but they had to have known something dangerous like that could have happened when some of the world’s best were wiping out at the same turn that killed him. Yeah, hindsight is 20/20 and all that mumbo-jumbo, but they could have at least gotten in front of the press and said, “Our bad. We’ll learn from this so that it doesn’t happen again.” Instead, they said, “It was his fault, but we’ll put up this board to keep the others from flying out.”

So to recap:

Events are not my cup of tea. TV is forced to show re-runs of good shows. “Why me?” Rodney Dangerfield is hilarious. Opening ceremony debacle was almost as funny but took too long to get to the punch-line. Tragedy of luger sucked and mishandled.

Yeah, the Winter Olympics suck.