Bill reminds you that you didn't enjoy the Summer Olympics between 1988 and 2000

Do you remember any of those games?  I was too young to know or care about Seoul in '88, but I enjoyed the fuck out of Barcelona and Atlanta.  Sydney not so much, but between Atlanta and then I turned 16 so I probably had better things to do than watch (like hang out in the parking lot of the local 7-Eleven).  Anyways I could swear I really had a great time following those 1992 and 1996 games.  Could swear.  Fortunately Bill's here to set me straight and make me realize that my memories are completely wrong.  Those Olympics actually sucked.

We wouldn't remember the next four Summer Olympics nearly as fondly. Seoul happened during my first year in college; like my freshman year,

Cue up Johnny Carson as Carnac the Magnificent.  Well, this is his bit reversed, but you know what I mean.

 it was tainted by drugs, cheating and a series of unexpected second-place finishes. 

HI YOOOOOOO

(I'm still angry at John Thompson, by the way.) 

I'm sure he's sorry.

Barcelona happened right after I miraculously graduated with a 3.04 — the biggest upset of the 1990s

Add to the list of "That Guys" who Bill is: That Guy who thinks you will think he's cool if he tells you he got mediocre grades.  

— with the Dream Team effectively hijacking every other Olympic memory that summer. 

Yeah, didn't it suck when the best basketball team ever assembled put on a magnificent show for us over the course of two weeks?  Wasn't that just the worst?  Ugh, we should have boycotted those games like we boycotted Moscow in 1980.

Magic and Bird's farewell felt strangely fitting for me, like they were ushering in the official end of my childhood. 

OMG IT'S SO FITTING!  LOOK AT THAT BUILT IN NARRATIVE!  Now that I think about it, even though I was still in elementary school then, it was also kind of like the end of my childhood!  Basketball Jesus is at the center of my life and I'm not afraid to admit it!

The '96 Olympics in Atlanta were a massive letdown, 

Yeah, wasn't it terrible when the US cleaned up the medals (44 gold and 101 total; next closest in each category were 26 and 65) and we got to witness amazing moments from Michael Johnson, Amy Van Dyken, Andre Agassi, Carl Lewis (4th long jump gold for my main man Carl!  UH OH!), and yes, I hate to admit it, but Kerri Strug?  WHAT A LETDOWN.  BOO.  The only thing that actually sucked about these Olympics was that they were held in the south in July and August, but fortunately the atrocious summer weather didn't affect the 99.999% of us watching on TV.

marred by the frightening bombing (and ensuing witch hunt of Richard Jewell), an embarrassing level of overcommercialization, 

That started well before 1996.  Also, he's about to praise the Beijing games, so yeah, either they stopped commercializing the ever-loving shitpiss out of the Olympics, or Bill's head is in his ass as usual. 

NBC's relentlessly sappy puff pieces and a generally contrived vibe that everyone despised 

Read: that I despised

and that had absolutely nothing in common with the dutifully ironic, brooding, me-first attitude of Generation X. 

Yes, there is definitely a connection to be made between the stereotype of Americans born during the 60s and whether or not the Olympics were broadcast in an enjoyable fashion.  

What?

In the span of 12 short years, it was hard to say what changed more — the Olympics or us. 

(staring)

(barfing)

Meanwhile, I wasn't even writing anymore, just bartending, waiting tables, partying, brooding and staying up until 4 a.m. every night. My life sucked. So did the Atlanta Olympics.

Fuck you.  Die.

By the time Sydney rolled around in 2000, I had my own website and a snarky forum to poke fun of never-ending tape delays, 

WHY COULDN'T THEY JUST SHOW EVERYTHING LIVE FROM 9 TIME ZONES AWAY?  WHO SAYS NO?

puff pieces and everything else … you know, just like 10 million other frustrated, underpaid writers on the Internet. (Really, that was our first Internet Olympics.)

And boy did they suck!  Or something!  Bill has abandoned his incredibly self-centered and shoddy thesis.  It's almost like he put no thought into it in the first place.

During 2004's games in Athens, I had graduated to writing the "Sports Guy" column for ESPN.com, making decent coin 

Fuck you twice.

and breaking down Team USA's Basketball collapse with Unabomber-length manifestos. Americans digested that particular Summer Olympics the same way we digested everything else in 2004: inhaling everything while complaining the entire time. 

Almost as worthless and out of place as his Gen-X comment.  You wonder how he writes such dog shit, then you read the ESPN book and find out that he whines to his editor's boss when his editor tries to edit anything, and ultimately writes "stet all changes" on the manuscript and sends it back.

With 500 channels and dozens of Internet-related ways to distract ourselves, the idea of tape-delaying anything sports-related just seemed prehistoric. 

Yeah, who DIDN'T want to watch the events live from like 5 AM til 4 PM?  People with regular jobs? Pity for them.  They didn't have the idea of writing about sports on TV to an audience that liked everything about TV, with the silver spoon benefit of a very helpful AOL blog platform.  

We were pissed off. 

You were pissed off.

I don't even remember enjoying those Olympics, just being bitter about how badly that franchise had been screwed up. 

Now watch him gush all over the Beijing games.  The cognitive dissonance is staggering.

Athens was like watching Clooney as Batman and Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze.

Leave Mr. Freeze out of this.  Arnold did a great job.

Four years later, I passed up a chance to cover Beijing so I could write my 700-page monstrosity of a basketball book. Once upon a time, I had dreamed of covering a Summer Olympics, envisioning it as something of the Super Bowl for sports columnists. You zipped around, attended as many events as possible, ripped off pieces and tried to stand out. 

By pointing out that many Olympic level female athletes are attractive, and then by bringing up The Client List every three paragraphs.  

After 1996, 2000 and 2004, I just didn't care. Those days were dead. Or so I thought. Because Beijing rejuvenated the Olympics franchise, with NBC taking better advantage of its resources (cable and Internet) to show more events as they happened. Suddenly the viewer experience wasn't much different than attending in person — you jumped around and devoured as much as you could.

Of course you did!  Between midnight and 9 AM!  What, it's not like there was anything ELSE going on during those hours.  Thanks, NBC!  What a self-centered cunt this man is.  This is just like that article he wrote about how NBA coaches need to be more mindful of the feelings of season ticket holders.  HOW DARE YOU REST ANY OF YOUR STARS WHEN YOU COME TO MY CITY! I PAID GOOD MONEY FOR THESE SEATS!  SOMEBODY THINK ABOUT ME FOR ONCE!

It helped that Michael Phelps submitted an iconic performance, breaking out as a genuine superstar instead of a manufactured one. 

Which Olympic stars are of the manufactured variety?  99% of them are nobodies until they win something, and the other 1% play pro basketball and tennis and are already stars.

Somewhere between his fourth gold medal and his 27th, I started second-guessing myself for missing Beijing. When our hoops team barely fended off Spain in one of this decade's most underrated dramatic sporting events (no, seriously), 

I get that basketball is your thing, and that it's exciting that the US is great at it.  But come on--we get amazing basketball for like 7 months out of every year here.  You're no better than NBC, cramming basketball, gymnastics and swimming down our throats.

the Summer Olympics moved back atop my Sports Column Bucket List. I could have been there. I should have been there.

But I was too busy writing a book!  (Me!  I wrote a book!  A whole one!)

London is the 11th Summer Olympics of my lifetime and the 30th overall, making it the XXX Olympics (and if you think that's not going to be funny for three straight weeks, you're fooling youself). 

The funniness kind of seeped out of that one for me about 15 seconds after I first realized it.  I guess I'm either fooling myself or no longer in the seventh grade.

Ripping through those checkpoints again: 1972 (no memory),1976 (happy kid), 1980 (parents' divorce), 1984 (the patriotism/pop culture/TV/herofest), 1988 (college freshman), 1992 (college graduate), 1996 (bitter slacker), 2000 (Internet), 2004 (ESPN), 2008 (book), 2012 (here).

Thanks for the recap, news/talk radio host, but no one gives a shit.

That's right … I finally made it to the Summer Olympics.

There are so many parallels to Game of Thrones here, it's uncanny!

Gregg Easterbrook's Head Will Explode if He Sees This

I suggest you check out this video, which carefully explains how Olympic timing is accurate to 1/2000th [0.0005] of a second. This reinforces Jack's point and Larry's point that Gregg Easterbrook is an idiot. It's worth four minutes of your time.

The real problem, as usual, is sportswriters' hubris. Gregg Easterbrook ostensibly knows a lot about sports. Gregg Easterbrook probably doesn't know shit about technical devices for precision timing. Gregg assumes that since he doesn't understand precision timing, its use somehow degrades his assumedly-perfect knowledge of sports.

The fact is, we can determine who is faster. I wonder if Gregg is really arrogant enough to think that since he doesn't understand how it can be done, that no one can do it.

He probably is. That's what pisses me off.

Beijing Roundup

Since Larry B's been slacking on his on-the-spot investigative journalism, I'll have to take over. He's probably too busy trying to score with all the Olympic athletes from Sweden who finished their events two days ago and have nothing to do but cruise the Beijing bar scene.

Anyways. My gripes with Olympic coverage lately:

1. Soundbite re: a men's quarterfinal in the 200m:
"If there was an Olympic record for winning easily, Usain Bolt would hold it!"

I wonder how this record would be measured. Maybe in number of smiles, asshole fist-pumps or pointings to the crowd. Seems to be inherently slanted towards non-swimmers, as it's hard to see if Michael Phelps was grinning his big-eared ass off while he was whomping all those other people. But he wasn't, I'm sure, because he is nice and humble and white, unlike those fiery-tempered Latin sprinters.

2. NBC Commercial for the Opening Ceremonies DVD:
Own a part of the spectacular show that people will be talking about foever.

No. The only reason people might talk about this one even in six months? Part of it was faked. Does anyone ever talk about the Opening Ceremonies from past games? If you do, shut up and let me make a point already. Then, go back to wherever weird people like you live, which is probably in a foreign country.

3. Re: an Exxon commercial I've seen running several times:
"Why is this worldwide company involved in a public health problem?

Because devoting .0001% of their 11 billion dollar, national-record profits allows them to put sanctimonious ads on TV to convince more people of a generally false assumption that Exxon is devoting a large share of its energies to fixing public health problem, when actually Exxon is devoting a large share of its energies to fixing the public health problem of its execs not having enough Bentleys.

4. The disappearance of the "human rights" story.

All I heard about in the months and weeks leading up to these games was "China's human-rights record" and "Tibet" and all that. Now, China's not even letting protesters do what little they had hoped. Now, it makes sense to me not to turn th Olympics into a political statement... but it seems to me that a hell of a lot of journalists and media institutions were happy to jump on the "China sucks and mistreats its dissidents!" bandwagon four weeks ago, but are just as happy to jump on the "Wow, these are such a well-run Olympics!" train right now. I call bullshit.

__________________________________________________________________

Also, Jemele Hill's article on Michael Phelps [I think we here at FJM should go to a no-links on her] is unsurprisingly base and formulaic. What's really amazing is that Hill has an incredibly unique ability to generalize her own perspective to everyone. Most of us are cured of this by the time we graduate high school, when we realize that yes, other people do have different opinions. I won't do the whole article, because I think the first two paragraphs sums it up:

What's an athlete? Who's an athlete? What's mental toughness? What are limits? What is greatness?

We thought we knew those answers before Michael Phelps.

What's an athlete? Who's an athlete? Mental toughness? What are limits? What is greatness?
I knew all those answers before Michael Phelps, and I still do.

But now that we've witnessed Phelps win eight gold medals, it turns out we didn't know anything.

Speak for yourself, Jemele.

Chinese Democracy

While spinning through some Olympics coverage today, I found a worthwhile soundbite. Apparently Jim Caple is riding around on a bike to see how polluted Beijing really is. Folks, this is the kind of investigative journalism you can only get from the World Wide Leader in Sports. Jim helps prove the adage that all ordinary people look ridiculous when equipped and dressed up in professional cycling gear.

Unfortunately, because of all this "credit crunch" and "gas prices" nonsense, there's a lot of belt-tightening going on here at FJM HQ. Thanks to expense cuts, I think Larry B will be the only FJM reporter on the ground at Beijing:2008 and he's staying at the Econo Lodge in Changxindian, chosen for its relatively inexpensive donuts, its relative difficulty to pronounce and its distance from all major airports and events. Even the Stansted Express doesn't serve it. Last time I checked, he could only score tickets to men's handball, the preliminary heats of the 200m breaststroke and both men's and women's luge. Still, stay tuned for his incisive coverage of the Games' political and cultural significance. Doubtless he'll have a lot to say.

Anyways. On to the best part of Caple's article: an interview with a guy who is apparently the jokester prince of American cycling:

"There's definitely something in the air," David Zabriskie said after his ride. "It's like that Lynyrd Skynyrd song. 'Oooh that smell. Can't you smell that smell? Oooh that smell.'"

Yes. Yes it is. David. In fact, I think you're more accurate than you realize. I'd forgotten how amazing/ridiculous/alarming/intruiguing those lyrics were.

Actually, Zabriskie might be on to something. Considering that the top sponsors - like Coca-Cola- have had to shell out hundreds of millions of dollars for that title, and the air quality particulate readings that exceed even targets for developing nations ... I'm sure the citizens of the 13th most polluted city in the world understand what Ronnie Van Zant meant when he originally sang:

There's too much coke and too much smoke
Look what's going on inside you.

It's almost like Ronnie was delivering a prophetic apostrophe to a city in need of a candid diagnosis of its diseased state.

Intrepid readers, the facts are all in. The 2008 Beijing Olympics theme song: Lynyrd Skynyrd's "That Smell".

Hey, a New Joke: Olympic Baseball!

Check this out:


Doesn't it look like a pretty awesome futuristic place to watch a baseball game? The whole complex looks like a great place to go to watch a night game. I imagine walking up to the field, surrounded by citizens of many nations, excited to see Americans compete in what can only be described as a parody of real baseball.

The format is a first in international baseball competition and differs significantly from the currently used extra-inning model. The new rule calls for traditional baseball extra-inning rules to be used in the 10th frame, but all contests that are tied after 10 innings will compete under a new format. Beginning with the 11th inning and each inning needed thereafter, base runners will be placed on first and second base with no outs. All other rules of baseball will remain in effect.

I like how this little paragraph has the ending "All other rules of baseball will remain in effect" after proposing what seems, to me, to be an absolutely ludicrous rule change. Maybe the IBAF was considering giving batters five strikes? Maybe they considered reintroducing aluminum bats late in the game? Maybe they considered going back to 1863 and not allowing the pitcher to take a step during his delivery, thereby forcing him to keep both feet on the ground while pitching?

"The upcoming Beijing Olympic competition may be our last unless we are successful in adding the sport back to the Olympic program for the 2016 Games," said IBAF President Dr. Harvey W. Schiller.

Fine by me, unless we make it a Winter Olympic sport so the best players on the planet can actually play in it without wrecking every fourth MLB season. The problem with Olympics is that, for most sports, the Olympics is the paramount display of skill and no athlete would miss the event for the world. For Olympic baseball, no American cares enough to leave his MLB team for a few weeks.

"We must demonstrate to the International Olympic Committee not only does our game belong alongside the other great sports of the world, but our sport is manageable from a television and operational standpoint."

Our sport is manageable from a television and operational standpoint. Amazingly, thousands of MLB games every year are operated and televised. If real baseball players [apologies, Mr. "President"] were playing in this game, then it would be no problem. Theoretically, basketball could go on into the middle of the night, but since real players play that sport, nobody feels the need to lower the rim after one overtime to make scoring easier.

Dr. Schiller continued, saying the change is both a positive and necessary step for the sport of baseball. "One of the unique aspects of our game is that it has no time limit.

Yay! Though, I know it's surprising, lots of other team sports don't have time limits. In fact, theoretically, even a tennis match could go on indefinitely! I think, in order to make the last Wimbledon more manageable from a television and operational standpoint, Federer and Nadal should've ended it by playing a game of beer pong at the net. Oh wait! That could go on forever too! Crap!

The only solution?

Extra-inning contests can bring about the most exciting results for players and fans,

Now yer talkin'!

but such circumstances also make it difficult in the context of the Olympic program.

Only because nobody cares about baseball.

Delays cause scheduling and logistical nightmares. Planned security, transportation, drug testing, broadcasts, and entertainment are just a few of the activities that may be seriously affected," Dr. Schiller continued.

Drug testing is affected by extra inning games? Entertainment is provided by the extra-inning games, Dr. Schiller! Why are you selling out the sport you claim to love in order to provide a bastardized version?

I sure would be pissed if my team lost because the rules demanded that each manager would have to :

select two consecutive batters from anywhere {!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!} in their respective lineup to start the 11th on first and second base. The next batter in the lineup would then be the batter that starts the inning at the plate.

{exclamation points mine}

Oh shit! It's like video games, except that even in video games you have to continue the lineup in order! I can only imagine what would've taken place if this rule would've been in place during the 2002 World Series and a game would've gone to extra innings:

Angels Bullpen: Sweet, we got through ten innings of baseball and we're tied! Boy, we really have a shot at beating these Giants, seeing as they really only have one hitter in their nine-man lineup!
Angels_Batters: Yeah, don't worry, we'll scratch a run off Robb Nen or something and win this here game!
Umpire: And now we move to the 11th inning. Mr. Baker, please place your runners on base.
Dusty_Baker: Even I can't screw this one up! Rich, get out on second, Jeff get out on first.
Barry_Bonds: lol, I rule.
Olympic_Fans: This is the stupidest rule change ever.