The Olympics

Last weekend I was in the mall, and saw that GAP was selling T-shirts with past Olympic logos.  Paris 1924, L.A. 1932, Montreal 1976…curiously, no sign of Berlin 1936.  Sorry, we’re all out.

 By which I should clarify, that with a few exceptions, most of my comments herein apply to the Summer games.  I’ve been watching some of the London games, with varying degrees of regularity and diligence.  The events I’ve been watching most have been women’s gymnastics and swimming, mainly the ones NBC has been throwing at us, probably because of Michael Phelps and because the US womens’ gymnastic team is dominant this time around (they’re also pretty cute).  I don’t recall China being this competitive at prior games; in Beijing they won the most gold medals, while the US had the top total.

 Here are the listings (summer games):

 1896     Athens, Greece

1900     Paris, France

1904     St. Louis, USA

1908     London, UK

1912     Stockholm, Sweden

1916     WWI games between Central Powers and Allied Powers

1920     Antwerp, Belgium

1924     Paris, France

1928     Amsterdam, Holland

1932     Los Angeles, USA

1936     Berlin, Germany

1940     WWII Games between Axis and Allies

1944     WWII Games between Axis and Allies

1948     London, UK

1952     Helsinki, Finland

1956     Melbourne, Australia

1960     Rome, Italy

1964     Tokyo, Japan

1968     Mexico City, Mexico

1972     Munich, West Germany

1976     Montreal, Canada

1980     Moscow, USSR

1984     Los Angeles, USA

1988     Seoul, South Korea

1992     Barcelona, Spain

1996     Atlanta, USA

2000     Sydney, Australia

2004     Athens, Greece

2008     Beijing, China

2012     London, UK

2016     Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

 Starting with 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, the Winter Games began being staggered at 2 years – same years as the World Cup.   If I pay scant attention to the Summer Games, I pay almost no attention to the Winter Games, regardless of whether US athletes are competitive in the particular event or not.

 I was too young to have watched the Munich games in 1972 (and wasn’t even born in 1968) so the 1976 games in Montreal were the first ones I remember.  I vaguely recall seeing Nadia Comaneci on TV when I was 7 years old.  She’s still a celebrity in Romania, though she doesn’t seem to do much these days except be a celebrity.  Let’s see Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian get a 10 in gymnastics.

 1980.  We boycotted the Moscow games, and beat the Russkis in hockey at the Winter Games in Lake Placid.  Woohoo!

1984.    L.A.  We watched these at my aunt & uncle’s house in McLean, as they had air conditioning, a modern luxury which one Foreign Service family, living on McArthur Blvd. in DC, felt was unnecessary (it wasn’t us).  Mary Lou Retton availed herself of Nadia’s former coach to score a 10.  The East Bloc boycotted these games in retaliation for ours in 1980, except for Ceaucescu, who sent the Romanians to L.A. anyway.

1988.    Seoul.  ZZZ.

1992.    Barcelona.  NBA players finally allowed to compete in basketball >> “Dream Team”.  ZZZ for me, I don’t watch basketball anyway.

1996.    Atlanta.  Years later, the FBI finally nabbed Eric Rudolph, the real bomber.  Sorry, Mr. Jewell.

2000.    Sydney.  ZZZ.

2004.    Athens.  ZZZ.

2008.    Beijing.  ZZZ.

2012.    London.  Not quite ZZZ, more like Z.

 Germans.  In 1930, to make up for the 1916 games which had been scheduled for Berlin (but cancelled due to everyone fighting World War I) the IOC gave the Germans the Olympic games in Berlin in 1936 (and the Winter Games in Garmisch), which Adolf Hitler took advantage of when 1936 rolled by.  Jesse Owens, however, didn’t fully cooperate and embarrassed Hitler by winning a few medals.  However, the Germans still won the most gold medals and overall medals.  This would have been a fun series to watch, if only we could substitute these games for the 2012 games on TV.  How about that – select WHICH Olympics you want to watch.  Get working on it, ESPN wizards.

            Likewise, drama unfolded in Munich in 1972 – another group of sickos wasted the Israeli team.  Fortunately the Israelis tracked down the rest of the killers (see “Munich”).  In other news, Mark Spitz excelled at swimming and Olga Korbut (USSR) wowed in gymnastics. 

 Winter Olympics Highlights.  First held in 1924 at Chamonix, France (home of Mont Blanc).  The 1936 games were held in Garmisch, which I visited for skiing in 1990 with my brother and best friend.  As mentioned above, we won in hockey in 1980.  The 1994 Lillehammer Games were the ones immediately after the Tonya Harding & Nancy Kerrigan scandal.  Kerrigan won the silver behind Oksana Baiul (Ukraine) who won the gold.  The major Winter events are figure skating and skiing – hardly luge (Norm McDonald: “there is no such thing as professional luge”) or bobsled (even for Jamaicans). 

 The games themselves vary in interest level to me.  I’m not really much of a sports guy.  I do NOT digest all those statistics, nor do I feel testicularly compelled to “get into” literally EVERY sport (with an American jingo-bonehead conspicuous ignorance of soccer, though when I lived in France I was guilty of this willful ignorance).  So I’m scarcely more inclined to watch the Olympics than any other sporting event – less so, in fact, than the World Cup.  Speaking of which, despite 5 World Cup victories, Brazil has never won the gold medal in soccer at the Olympics.  No one can explain this. 

            I would suggest that anyone else simply watch what you want to watch, and ignore everything else.  You have NO patriotic duty to watch Americans compete in any sport.  Surely they won’t notice if you zone out back home (“OMG, Gabby Douglas fell off the balance beam because someone in America changed the channel!”). 

            At an abstract level, the athletes compete at such a high level, so far beyond my capabilities, that they may as well be aliens.  That makes them…sometimes interesting to watch.  What I don’t see is any nationalism entering the equation for the athletes themselves.  When you get down to swimming, gymnastics, basketball, etc. all sports are ultimately sports and apolitical.  It’s the spectators watching, waving the flags, who inject that element into the sport.  The athletes themselves don’t seem to care.  All they care about is winning – not for their country, not for their families, or their coaches, or their hometowns, but for themselves.  Which is as it should be.

            I suppose a political argument could be raised about results.  In the past, East Germany was notorious for doping its female athletes with steroids (remember Joe Piscopo?).  I’m not sure the Chinese haven’t upped the ante this time around.  But those who argue in favor of statist regimes [these people do exist today, Michael Moore is at the top…though he lacks the intellectual honesty to admit it] should observe how strong the First World countries, especially the US, do at the Olympics.  That a brutal regime that doesn’t care about individuals should be able to bludgeon its children and citizens into top class athletes is not much of a surprise.  Reward them with benefits the ordinary proletariat never sees and hold their families hostage at gunpoint to assure gold medals.  All well and fine.  Then how do these fat, lazy, decadent Westerners do so well?  Let’s see: the Soviets dominated the medal counts in 1956, 1960, 1972, 1976, and 1988.  The USA dominated in 1948, 1952, 1968, 1996, 2000, and 2004, with 1964 split and 1980 and 1984 being obvious outliers due to the mutual boycotts.  Really, the analysis should combine together all First World medals (not just USA) and all communist countries (not just the USSR), ignoring minor spats like Yugoslavia and Red China.  I don’t have the patience to figure that out. 

            By the way, I’m not aware that the Vatican ever sends a team to the Olympics…but Iran does.  Islam beats Catholicism at the Olympics.  So we’ll root for Israel.  Close enough.

            Finally, don’t get me started about “McDonalds”-themed America-bashing.  The next fast-food-obese US athlete I see will be the first.  Michael Phelps and Jordyn Wieber don’t seem to worship at the Golden Arches, though Phelps’ herbal preferences don’t seem to have impacted his abilities in the pool.  I’m not aware that tobacco smokers are well-represented in his sport. 

            Let’s go US!  And if we don’t win in London, there’s Rio in four years.  

Summer of '84

It’s summer of 2007, as hot and humid as any other I can remember, and by now I’ve gone through almost 40.  But a few special summers stick out in my memory, and none more than this one: 1984.

 I had just finished sophomore year in high school in Paris, and most of my friends, including my best friend Phil, somehow chose that particular summer to have their families move away from Paris.  Fortunately we got home leave that summer, so we were able to spend about 6 weeks in the US, which for us was like heaven.  The night before the flight home was as exciting and difficult to sleep through as Christmas Eve.

 With our own house rented out, finding a place to stay was a challenge each time we returned.  This time we traded spaces with a family in DC, who had a small house off McArthur Blvd.  I was 15, my brother 14, and my sister was 9, but we were all much larger than the young children this family had, so the beds were all a bit on the small side.  Their “kitchen table” consisted of a booth from a subway car, about as large as the kiddie section of a McDonalds and way too cramped for a normal sized teenager.   They also had air conditioning, but with a huge Chinese bed on the ground floor (!) with really no practical purpose other than to block airflow through the ground floor of the house, the A/C didn’t work too well.   The kitchen had no glasses, only coffee mugs.  Finally, this was one of these Foreign Service families who had travelled all over the world and wanted EVERYONE who entered their tiny Bag End hovel to know it.  They decorated it like a travel museum – “this is where we’ve been!! aren’t we great??” – including the afore-mentioned bed in the living room.  With all the way-too-small crap of the entire house (built for hobbits!) what they really needed was a large, circular door to complete the Middle Earth connection.  Damn travel snobs.  Our own apartment in Paris was 3 times larger – these people clearly got the better end of the swap.  Returning to Paris and our own place was a rescue from claustrophobia. 

 The 1984 Olympics were going on in Los Angeles, and our relatives lived in McLean – in a normal sized house with properly functioning air conditioning and no Chinese bed – so we spent a considerable amount of time there.  We also watched lots of “Mork & Mindy” for some reason (don’t ask me why).  I didn’t pay a great deal of attention to the Olympics, even Mary Lou Retton’s perfect 10, as much because I generally don’t care for the Olympics anyway as for the absence of the Soviet Bloc because of their boycott. Interesting – Romania did NOT join the boycott, but Retton won anyway.  The Romanian women’s team did win the gold for the team competition, whereas the US men’s team won the gold.  For being smart enough to buck the trend (“80 percent of success is showing up” - Woody Allen), Ceaucescu’s gang cleaned up with 53 models, #2 after the US with 174.  The overall consensus even among Americans was that our stellar performance was only because so many countries who usually compete heavily with us (e.g. the USSR and East Germany) were absent.

 Reagan was President, Bush Sr. was Vice-President, and the upcoming November election would feature Walter Mondale & Geraldine Ferraro getting hosed big time (keep that in perspective when we see Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers!). 

 I got my first contact lenses, and had a devil of a time learning to take them out and put them in, but it was worth the effort.

 The trip started with a stay at the Howard Johnson’s hotel in Crystal City, where I got a massive sunburn, with the resulting days of unbearable itchiness.  D’oh!

 We met up with Phil, whose family was living in Greenbelt while they were waiting for their sea shipment to arrive from France; they would eventually move to Sterling.  This was notable as it was the first time we’d ever met any of the people we had originally met in Paris, in the US.  The place they were staying in had a VERY OLD black & white TV with a distorted picture tube.  More “dark brown and yellow” than black & white, and anything round, like an aspirin, looked more like an egg.  (“How do you remember this stuff??”)

 I was also doing lots of reading, in particular devouring, for the first time, H.P. Lovecraft (horror) and Michael Moorcock (fantasy).  We were also heavily into role-playing games at that time, so we got Stormbringer, which was Chaosium’s RPG for the Elric books.  I had bought Judas Priest’s albums Sad Wings of Destiny and Sin After Sin at the PX in Belgium prior to the trip, and Black Sabbath Master of Reality at Henderson Hall here in the US, so those three albums served as a musical backdrop for the horror stories and Elric saga.  Twisted Sister were big at this time, particularly their hit “We’re Not Gonna Take It” with the classic video featuring Niedermeyer from “Animal House” as the nasty father.  More magic, listening to that, reading that, in this stupid little hobbit house. 

 It was a great summer – and I STILL listen to those albums fairly often.  At least NOW I can drive....