Superb Olympics

Super Bolympics, Superb Bowlimpics, however you want to say it.

I am a huge sports fan. Especially recently.

In our household we haven’t watched TV, the kind broadcast as VHF or UHF radio waves from a giant antennae and picked up with a set of rabbit ears on your home set, in decades. Not since they took our god-given analogue signal off the air. And I’ve never had cable television in my life, so until my partner realized she could subscribe to Peacock network on the internets to watch bicycle racing I basically haven’t watched any sort of sports programming in a very long time. Peacock also carries World Cup Alpine ski racing, and the Super Bowl, and it also presents Olympic coverage, so we’re watching a lot of sports lately. And that’s great because I’m a quick study in terms of being a sports fan. I pick up the nuances of various sports with ease. I’m really all-American that way. It’s like when we invade a new country we all very quickly assimilate the historical and social context of a new enemy, their military, their geography, their social and economic situation … we’re naturals.

That’s how I am with sports. I don’t care what sort of competition it is, after about 20 minutes of watching and listening to the commenters I have an intimate understanding of the whole sport including most of the rules. It’s a gift, really.

As I noted, we’ve been watching a lot of alpine ski racing so I’m more qualified than most of you to comment on the unfortunate agony of defeat for Lindsey Vonn, who is a veteran Olympian at 164 years old in horse years. Unlike many of you I have an intuitive grasp of how important a properly functioning knee is to flying down a snow and ice covered slope at 72 miles per hour - even faster in kilometers per hour like the way they ski in Europe where the Milan-Cortina (Italy) Olympics are being held and they use the “metric system.”

I didn’t have a good feeling about Lindsey competing after she tore a ligament that provides (technical term here) stability to her knee in resisting the torsional stresses incurred in even casual skiing, or just walking down stairs.

While I was not surprised that Lindsey crashed out in spectacular fashion just seconds into her downhill run I did not anticipate the horrifying broken tibia injury she suffered. And, man, did she suffer! They heard her screaming all the way at the bottom of the course. I think even the helicopter pilot heard her screaming. The screaming did not stop until they winched her into the air and flew away to the supportive cheers of the shocked crowd who went on to enjoy the rest of the race.

It’s fortunate that Vonn wasn’t racing at Saratoga because with that sort of injury they would have sent out the veterinarians to put her down. But they don’t euthanize the competitors in most major sports other than horse racing, at least in none of the sports I’ve been watching so far. Usually, like in American football, they have a tent to set up so you don’t see the broken body parts. I think you need a more exclusive contract to get coverage inside the medical tent, Peacock Gold or something. It’s not part of our package.

Anyway, Lindsey is now on the mend, so that’s good. We’ll see how she’s feeling about giving it another go in another 4 years.

What I did not expect about the Olympics were the number of heated rivalries in the various competitions. Apparently there is a lot of sex happening. Immediately after winning a gold medal a Norwegian Nordic athlete (I’m not going to look up his name because you have no idea who he is anyway) broke down and cried like a teenage figure skater about having an affair. This took his now former girlfriend by surprise along with the rest of us who had no inkling of what was going on in the woods off camera.

And then there is biathlon which is a Nordic skiing sport that combines target shooting and having relationships with people of the same and opposite sexes. I admit to being a little unclear on the details of scoring this particular competition but I applaud the open mindedness and free spirit of the sport. People in winter sports countries don’t tend to be as prudish as Americans. Maybe that’s why we’ve never won a medal in biathlon, but I’m looking forward to seeing how we do in the trans events in the next Olympics after we sort out some of the issues we’ve been seeing in local school board meetings, like in Queensbury.

On the same day that some American who was not Lindsey Vonn won gold in Downhill racing we had the Super Bowl which is the international championship in American style football where competitors are allowed to use their hands on the ball but scoring is (apparently) mainly accomplished by kicking the ball through a pair of upright posts at the end of the field in what is known as a field goal for 3 points. After nearly three quarters of the game has finished teams are allowed to run or pass the ball into the end zone for a 6 point “touchdown” followed by a free attempt at a field goal, but this time to score only a single point. I know, it’s complicated, but you catch on to the system pretty quickly.

I enjoyed this particular championship because the winning team was not owned by a billionaire friend of the notorious pedophile sex trafficker Jeffery Epstein (who it increasingly seems did not commit suicide out of regret for the evil he perpetrated, nor does his former girlfriend seem to feel bad about it, at all) like Robert Kraft, the owner of the losers is, or was. But the big story was not the game, it was the halftime show put on by Bad Bunny who created fabulous theater that outraged pedophiles (and their protectors) everywhere by having fully clothed dancers and singing in his native language, and having an elaborate set (reminiscent of an island) built on the football field in minutes just for this 13 minute show - which is nearly 1/4 of the playing time of the whole game but Bad Bunny did it all in one seamless play without all the starts and stops and commercial breaks that make a regular game seem endless. But, in a tip of the hat to the game, he did bring flags. The half-time show was a tremendous logistical feat that could only be pulled off by someone with immense skill and talent and a true love of mankind in their heart.

Despite having been quoted as saying “I could rape someone in the middle of the Super Bowl, and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” Donald Trump took offense at the show. Maybe he thought the island was too much like he remembered Jeffrey Epstein’s island. Maybe he was just angry that Bad Bunny didn’t give him the Grammy he feels entitled to. Who knows? But he took offense, and you can be certain that Bad Bunny will not be invited to the Trump-Kennedy Center any time soon. Or to the new ballroom at the White House which appears to have hit a regulatory roadblock.

Hey, I have an idea! What if we put Bad Bunny in charge of planning for a new addition to the White House to replace the section of the People’s House that Donald Trump had torn down without consulting any of us, without following any rules laid out in our national rule book.

That’s the thing with sports, they have rules, and referees or umpires, and judges who hold athletes accountable for breaking the rules. It’s one of the things I like best about sports that I wish we would try to bring into our regular lives, so that everyone can compete on relatively equal footing and we can celebrate the diversity, equity, and inclusion that everyone loves about the Olympics.