Relative Something

Enough about my silly winter weekend activities. The eyes of the world are on the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver. As much as I love to watch sports, (I saw a wonderful opinion piece yesterday questioning whether a lot of what we see being subjectively judged should really be called a sport), there is a lot about these games that I fail to fully grasp.

The US snowboard star, Shaun White, was asked how his gold medal winning run of 4 years ago would stand up against the judging of today’s event. His guess was that it might barely be enough to qualify for the finals now, but that’s it. The same thing happens in figure skating. Once someone masters a new level of trick that has 4 spins instead of 3, then 4 spins becomes compulsory to challenge for the top medal. What if, when someone hit an extremely long homerun in baseball, it became the new standard and all homeruns needed to be that long? These judged events just continue to grow more outrageous every year.

How in the heck, as a casual spectator, am I supposed to discern whether a person has spun around 3 or 4 times? How am I going to notice whether a boarder spun a 900 or a 1080? If Curling can be presented as a spectator sport, why don’t they spend a little of that dead time between stone deliveries to explain to all of us who have never set foot in a venue where curling occurs, (the majority of the world’s population), what the actual rules of the game really are?

The most difficult aspect of wanting to see actual Olympic competition, especially those of us subject to receiving US television broadcasts, is surviving the overwhelming volume of advertising blasted at us throughout the hours the network has scheduled their coverage. It’s worse than trying to watch an NFL game on television, and that is a pretty drastic milestone to surpass! There seem to be more minutes per hour of ads than there are Olympics. What little competition we are granted tends to get whittled down to the medal winning performances. There is a lot more going on than we ever get to see.

Lastly, I don’t understand why there is any reason to compare how many medals each country has. If they need to do it, the least they could do is weight it to take into consideration how many athletes per country there are. Either way, it fails to provide any valuable information related to the spirit of the Olympic competition.

Regardless all my gripes, I still love to see the winter Olympic games. All the way to the end of the month, any free time I have will likely involve a large percentage of tuning in whatever coverage I can get. It definitely offers something that none of the professional or college league sports are able to conjure up during the rest of the days of the year.