Only after hours of non-stop coverage of rowing can one truly appreciate why the Olympics end up as more of an annoyance than a celebration of the world's great athletes.
After all, who cares about most of these pseudo-sports anyway? If they were genuinely interesting, some TV executive somewhere would demand that the world championships of swimming/rowing/gymnastics/equestrian etc., be shown on a network.
Hell, if these world championships (which are held every year in almost every Olympic sport) were even worth watching, you would have to think it would at least show up on cable somewhere. But it doesn't.
Then, as if watching worthless sports wasn't bad enough, we are subjected to the patronizing, omniscient words of Bob Costas, who in his pathetic attempt to wax eloquence pretends to know all there is to know about every event in the Olympics. And, desperate for his commentating to be one day considered among the best, Costas makes every U.S. gold medal sound like one of the great triumphs of world history.
In all fairness, Costas isn't the only one to blame.
The entire crew at NBC should be reprimanded for attempting to make us cry with stories of human drama before every event.
If Lance Armstrong were in the Olympics, his story of overcoming cancer would be a legitimate one to tell. But when we're talking about something like an athlete dealing with the death of his/her grandfather, or Michael Phelps' close relationship with his mother, or Paul Hamm's intense personal decision whether or not to give back the gold medal, I can't help but think that every person goes through personal drama in his or her life.
Guess what? My grandpa is dead too, and I have a close relationship with my mother, I even had to give back some poker chips one time when the casino overpaid me, but you don't see NBC putting together an emotional montage about how I persevered to become a sports writer at my school's newspaper. (You may now cry if my story touched you.)
The truth of the matter is that most world-class athletes are very selfish people that don't usually deserve to be deified by the American media.
A case in point is the gold medallist in speed skating from the winter Olympics, Derek Parra. I golfed with him a year ago and he told me that he spends about six months a year in Salt Lake City training while leaving his wife and baby behind in Florida. During the Winter Olympics, Parra was painted by the media as a great family guy, but the bottom line is that he spends half of every year chasing his dream-not being a family man.
Olympic athletes are the kind of people that miss events like the birth of their own baby just to make it to an Olympic qualifier. They are often single-minded people who are determined to be the best in the world at their given sport, but they are not necessarily the kind of people we should be striving to emulate.
Oh yeah, one more thing. I think I'm going to throw up the next time I see another U.S. Olympian mouth the words of the national anthem. Awards ceremonies are contrived media events with little actual meaning, and I fail to understand the significance behind watching one of these athletes sing the national anthem.
Yeah, yeah, democracy rules, America is amazing, if you aren't from America you probably suck-we get the message. But is that really the message the Olympics should be sending?
tsmith@chronicle.utah.edu
