At the Olympic Games, thighs matter
The Olympic Summer Games — the ones that do not involve hockey pucks, frostbite or Tonya Harding — are rapidly approaching. So it is time to brush up on the competitions that will confirm America’s dominance as the land of the fleet and the home of the occasionally well behaved.
Once again we will remind Emperor Naruhito that we won the war, even though he may be the only spectator in the stands, given COVID-19 restrictions banning fans.
Track and field is the overarching theme of the summer Olympics, and the track part is straightforward. A bunch of elite athletes run a prescribed distance, and the one who gets to the finish line first wins. What could be simpler?
The same for swimming. Plow through the water, kick at the wall at the other end of the pool, and come back. Repeat as necessary until all your opponents are coughing up water. It’s called the Michael Phelps maneuver. Perhaps you’ve seen it in Olympics past. It was in all the papers.
Basketball? You don’t need my help. Women’s beach volleyball? Love the outfits. However, several of the more obscure events might bewilder many Americans. This national confusion concerns me, as does our collective ignorance of geography.
You need to understand that Tobago is not a hot sauce and Eritrea is not a body part. Nor is Bhutan an outdoor stove. St. Vincent and the Grenadines is a country, not a rock band, and they will be bringing their “A” game.
If we are investing so much to assert our superiority over outliers like Uruguay and Tonga, then we all need to educate ourselves about the sports we pay attention to only once every four years. Let me provide clarity about events that in the past may have prompted you to scratch your head and ask yourself, “What doofus thought of this one?”
Take the javelin competition. The idea of the javelin is to throw the thing as far as you can. The javelin is amazing in its simplicity. It’s nothing more than a big stick with a sharp point — a giant toothpick really. In the hands of a skilled javelin thrower, the toothpick flies gracefully through the air and then jams itself into the ground. In the hands of a novice, someone could die.
The International Olympic Committee should come up with a new sport: javelin catching. Anybody can throw a javelin, but let’s see somebody grab one of those bad boys out of the air. Now we’re talking entertainment.
Then there is the shot put. Basically, the rules require the contestant to pick up a bowling ball and heave it. This apparently provides amusement to those who do it and a nap to non-participants nearby. To the stout athletes who heave their bowling balls the farthest, medals are awarded.
Next is the hammer throw. Do I really need to explain? You grab a hammer, spin around and throw it. I would be good at this. I hit my thumb with a hammer once and flung the thing across the street (the hammer, not the thumb). I was grateful nobody over there was harmed, but I did need to buy my neighbor a new mailbox.
The elite hammer thrower remembers to let go at the appropriate moment. Failure to master the art of the release could introduce the athlete to human flight. That’s because it’s not actually a hammer. It’s a heavy weight at the end of a rope. It is called a hammer because nobody wants to be known as an Olympic champion of the “heavy weight at the end of a rope” competition.
What about the discus event, you ask? Again, the point is to throw something — this time an extremely heavy Frisbee. Why not just use a real Frisbee? It would go a lot farther.
When you settle in for Hour 422 of Olympic television coverage, you might be surprised to discover that bicycling is an Olympic sport. At last, here is an activity that you yourself did as a child. But trust me, you do not have the bike — or the thighs — that these competitors do. At the Olympics, thighs matter.
The marathon is one Olympic event most of us are already familiar with, but perhaps you did not know that it was introduced by a Greek soldier named Phidippides, who once ran all the way from Marathon to Athens, aided only by a favorable tailwind and two bottles of Aquafina.
Thus was born the “marathon,” named not for the fellow who first ran it but for the town, and only because calling it the “Phidippides” would have been a mouthful. Over time, the 26-mile ordeal was lengthened by another 385 yards, just so runners would pass the 26-mile mark and encounter a painful reality: “Geeezus, I’m dying here, and I’ve still got another thousand freakin’ feet to go?”
Five new sports have been added to the 2021 Summer Games: skateboarding, surfing, karate, three-on-three basketball and climbing. I am not making this up. Somebody will win a gold medal in climbing. I’m betting on the dudes from Nepal. (It gets better, or maybe worse: Breakdancing will become an Olympic event in Paris in 2024).
Eventually, this year’s Summer Games will come to an end, the closing ceremony will go unwatched by millions, and NBC will rent several Nimitz-class aircraft carriers to get all its people and equipment home from Japan. Tokyo will be stuck with stadiums that weren’t needed, but the danger of impaling Emperor Naruhito with a flying toothpick will have passed.