1904 Olympics

Hurling and curling and twirling, oh my.  Watching the Olympics is like being forced to watch the Oscars red carpet show on E! And then the Oscar ceremony on regular TV and then the After Parties on half a dozen other channels.  Times two weeks.

At Biff’s Sports Bar Olympics are on 58 different big screen TVs.  It’s a good thing they have 100 others so we can get our fill of not only the Olympics, but every college basketball game, wrestling match, every NHL and NBA game, Bowling for Dollars, the World Series Nostalgia Channel and of course ESPN 1 through 27, Fox Sports from four time zones, NBC Sports, ABC Sports, CBS Sports, the Golf Channel, the Fishing Channel, the Poker Channel, the Ice Follies Channel (shared time with Disney on Ice but excluding the security camera of Walt in the Cryogenic Morgue.) The Hunters Hunting Hunters Channel. The Boxing Channel.  The Solitaire Channel.

But even without that stuff, there’s the Olympics.  Every sport you ever heard of (except wrestling) on display. Constantly. Endlessly.

Why don’t we turn it off?  Because we might see a budding 21st Century version of Tonya Harding v. Nancy Kerrigan.  Or two star-crossed lovers getting married on a stalled ski lift.  Or the Russian Women Weightlifter bathing beauty show.  Or the next Richard Jewell not blowing up a conning tower.  You never know.

And then, there are the Big Questions.  Like “Can the US Goosestepping Team finally beat Germany?  Can the Republic of China finally top the People’s Republic of China at Mahjong? And keep your eyes on the Long Island women’s Mahjong team.  They haven’t won anything better than Bronze since the bronze age. And will the US Barfight team finally win over the Singapore Parliament?

Maybe some year, they’ll widen the scope to include non-sports types who love ridiculous and meaningless ceremony.

Cold Case Homicide investigators from the US, Costa Rica, Japan and Alsace Lorraine.  Philly Cheesesteak teams from America, Portugal and Senegal. And NASCAR.

The possibilities are endless.

But the best possible thing to train for is the turn-off-the-set team. Anyone can play. And although it’s only a participation trophy everyone who joins is a winner.

SHRAPNEL:

--One of our endless slogans at the Associated Press was “Best of the latest first.”  Someone should remind them by taking that out of storage and dusting it off.  Their new website takes forever to load and is larded with old junk no one needs to know about anymore.

--This space never advocates criminal acts.  But if some low level congressional drone should happen to drop a copy of the Democratic version of the memo about the FBI, trump and Russia and some sneaky journalist should happen to see it and pick it up and read it… who would notice? Where is Ben Bradlee when you need him?

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

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