The thing is that I feel sort of hypocritical watching the Summer 2008 Olympics. Who wouldn’t, right? I mean, this is just the sort of thing intended to make the world community feel good about China, and to compromise when we’re aware of their massive shortcomings, all the evils they’ve perpetrated, continue to perpetrate. We know we know.

I don’t have a clue where I picked up any love of sports that I have. It’s not that I was one of those typical girly-girls who didn’t like getting sweaty or dirty. I was never good at any sort of game or play and I sucked at gym at a kid. Except for tumbling, but I hated team sports. I hated the forced games we had to play that set us apart and embarrassed kids like me. In the 50s and early 60s, with an emphasis on “physical fitness” I was forced to do shit like sit-ups at home and bring in a paper that said I’d done them. My mom helped me. I hated them. I still do.

I went to summer camp, and you’d think there I would have done lots of phiscal games and sports but no, I didn’t. We had the hoice of all forms of activity and mine tended toward arts and crafts and ceramics, oh I loved ceramics. We had to take swimming and I was the oldest kid at camp who could not swim. Until one day when I could. I don’t know how or why, but it was the same with learning to ride a bicycle. I never had training wheels and I never could do it. Until one day I just could. Period.

We had “free period” at summer camp, and many of those days I spent taking a rowboat out to the middle of the lake. With a book. I liked rowing. I was apparently okay at it – never screwing up, always getting myself out and back. I used to watch the canoers taking “the tippy test” a test that you were required to pass before being allowed out in a canoe without an adult. It involved swamping the canoe, tipping it over and you getting safely back to shore. I was impressed. But rowboats had seats you could sit and read in.

Early on in college, I was walking across the campus green and met up with a guy who looked awfully out of place on y campus I’d met him at my sister’s college the previous year – weird, very weird – and he was Connecticut College’s new crew coach. Anita De Frantz tells a similar story about how she was recruited for our school’s brand new first ever women’s crew. Except Anita, (I’ve bored you with this story probably dozens of times) went on to win Olympic Bronze in 1976, as captain of the women’s team which was debuting at the Summer Games that year. She and I learned the sport together; I rowed in seat 5 in the women’s 8 but not for very long. She stayed with it and became a major important figure in women’s sports and the Olympic movement. But to this day, I’ll watch rowing. I never went down to the “Head of the Charles” when I lived in Cambridge, and I don’t know why. But I’ve been watching the heats today, both men and women rowing, in two and four seat boats.

The first night the Olympics were on, two nights back, they covered a sport I know nothing about, women’s saber. The entire range of medals was won by Americans, one who graduated from Notre Dame, one from Yale and a third woman who’s still at Duke. One of them is the daughter of two Olympic athletes. They met in 1976. They were both rowers. One of them, I just learned, was also a Conneccticut College rower. Huh. What a coincidence. Wait. Wait a minute. We were in the same graduating class. I remember her. Holy shit. I probably rowed with her too. Oh holy shit. And her daughter just got a gold medal.

These are my excuses for watching these games. These funny connections, this small world excuses. They make no sense, though. Because I’m also watching swimming, which I know nothing about. I don’t really understand why it is that I’m so drawn to watching the Olympics. Even opening ceremonies. I don’t get it. I hate pageantry and ceremony in almost every form. I hate parades, I hate pageants, I don’t get the fun of huge gatherings of people on July 4. I don’t like fireworks, crowds, and I hate nationalism in most forms. I don’t like it when crowds at international events chant “USA, USA” and I think the decision to allow the hockey jocks to light the flame during the SLC Olympics was ugly, nationalistic bullshit pride all about “we beat the commies” and not about sport. (I wish athletes all dressed in neutral, non-sponsored garb without flags and without country identifiers. I dislike flag-waving, lapel pins which prove your patriotism and “national pride” that rests on what we can do physically. Or “national pride” in general. I can’t influence where I was born, any more than I can take “pride” in the color of my hair. And too many ugly things have taken place in “our name”, so the hell with “USA, USA”.

The fucking Olympics are about SPORT, goddamit. About individual and group efforts to do stuff physically that is difficult, requiring skill training agility. I don’t know why I, bookish and not very capable of most anything physical, find it so intriguing. But I do. I love dance and I love diving. I love and am a passionate and knowledgeable fan of figure skating and I get rhythmic gymnastics. I watch hours of events that I sometimes don’t even understand, but not often, because they bore me. There are a lot of sports that won’t really interest you, I don’t think, unless you do them or have done them. So far that has included water polo [fill in requisite joke here about the poor horses) and shooting, bicycle road race. There are those I really don’t give a shit about, like boxing and wrestling and men’s basketball. My mom said “watch beach volleyball for 10 minutes” but I couldn’t even manage that long. Yes, it sure is skillful, but I think it’s bloody boring. And I swear that 4 years ago, when I watched the women play, they were not wearing underwear-style outfits so tiny that they invite comparisons to the goddamn Sports illustrated “swimsuit issue” which has nothing to do with sports. I found the outfits offensive. In order to play volleyball you don’t need to be wearing something close to bikini panties. Yuch.

But I watch to see how the host country represents itself (we’ve done some astonishingly tacky shit. We’ve offered Elvis impersonators and big trucks to “celebrate America. On the other hand, I own a book about the Atlanta quilt project which involved quilters making a presentation quilt for “everyOlympic committee and ever person who carried the flag in opening ceremonies. You see who’s been chosen and maybe why. You learn that this athlete survived something major, or that one was voited as their best athlete by peers. You learn how alphabets work (no kidding, the Beijing opening ceremonies used the Chinese alphabet and I learned about how that works and it was cool) and you get to criticize fashion. These games, for example, were the dullest, had the fewest interesting national costumes and were tediously western in terms of blazers or jackets, pants and ties. BLEAH. Even the colors were drab. Lots of white, lots of beige. I was hugely disappointed because I’ve found in the past that the colors and weaving, the shawls and the hats and the serapes and robes that you see can bring you information about a country. And this year, the countries went with safe, Western, boring and dull.

And yeah, I kept making every snarky remark you can imagine when we sat through the opening tan-tara celebrating China’s history. I am happy they didn’t decide to bring in terra cotta warriors no, wait that’s the really bad new “Mummy” movie.) And while I was in and out of the room a lot I didn’t see any depictions of the Great Wall. My guilt factor came into play however when I wondered just how, in this “celebration” of China’s contributions to “civilization (they claimed four – gunpowder (oh, thanks!) (which of course meant that we had more fireworks Friday night than ever before. Oh goody.(I don’t like fireworks, close or far away),paper, movable print type and the compass) we didn’t get the Red Guard beating people and hanging signs and dunce caps on them or musical depictions of re-education camps. In the displays of those gorgeous children wearing every kind of ethnic group dress that you can imagine, there were no little kids in Tibetan monks’ robes reminding us of repression and Chinese prison labor.

Well, shit. I’m so conflicted. Because I hate being compromised and I hate that I’m watching this, which is just what the fuck they’re trying to do – get us to ignore the Tianamen Square massacre for the road race that goes past that very location. And to be impressed by how modern a city it is (it’s not really smog, it’s “mist”. Right.) I also hate the macho (is there a better word for this because it comes from women to) that dictates that “gold is everything, silver is nothing” that invades the advertising, the interviews, the press releases. These are some of the best athletes in the entire world (some, because of course there’s no knowing how many people might otherwise be good at this stuff if they didn’t live in poverty, or hadn’t had a bad year or had better equipment and all those countless factors) and they’ve made it to a once-ever-four-years event. For some, it’s once in a lifetime because in four years, they’ll be too old, there will be people who can outdo them, they’ll have lost the spark, who knows. There are people competing in this Olympics who’ve been there five times before. There are 57 year old trapshooters and 41 year old swimmers yes! and there are 16 year old gymnasts and 14 year old divers. There are also women from countries like Egypt, Tunisia, women flag bearers from Jordan and Iran This matters.

What drives me into screaming rages as I try to watch the actual sports is the endless fluff about “how china isn’t what you think it is”, and incessant stories reminding us of the “sacrifices” that the athletes have made. The “sacrifices” especially of those in the west, of families who have money and houses and cars and the disposable income to be able to support their gifted kid. Of course it’s hard but can we stop after the first fifty reminders of the “sacrifices of the families”. Can we? Please? We’re going to be here for 3 weeks. Far better, however, is the intelligence levels of the commentators like blonde birdbrain dingbat Elfi Schlegel who went on at some length tonight dismayed over the lack of passion shown by the Roumanian women gymnasts. Golly gee, Elf, you’re right. I mean after all ask Comaneci how much FUN it was being a Roumanian gymnast. Eating disorders, what, two suicide attempts and being the whore, oh scuse me, girlfriend of one of Ceaucescu’s sons who decided she was good arm candy. That’s got to be so much fun. You’re right Tim, why aren’t they showing more devotion like they did back when it was worth your life to succeed at the goddam sport?

I so do not want to spend the next 3 weeks muting gymnastics the way I do figure skating because the commentators are insensitive, ignorant jerkwad morons. It’s just so sad that the Roumanian women aren’t tough any more. Now, back to endless babble about how Nastia Liukin has “gold in her blood” and how crushed the Americans are at having a minor error in a routineduring the preliminaries. I find it a tad amusing that apparently NBC claimed that during covering of these Olympic Games, they would not be focusing so hard on the Americans. Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!

It’s all about the athletes, it’s all about the athletes, she says with gritted teeth as she’s run out of the living room while NBC sucks up to George Bush. I’d rather watch a competition, ANY competition, beach marbles between Sweden and Mosambique, Biathlon (hot dog eating and kickboxing between Turkmenistan and Colombia, I don’t fucking care just don’t make me watch George Bush.

It’s about the athletes, it’s abou the….oh gods…..