Higher, faster, stronger, weirder

The Olympics crept up on me like ASIO on a socialist newspaper vendor. I knew it was coming, but I was genuinely surprised when I turned on my television and, instead of regular programming, I saw people running. Or swimming. Sometimes both, which was just sad.

Every four years people say they’re so over the Olympics, that the Olympics are fundamentally flawed, that they contain the wrong events. They ask: “Why don’t the horses get the medal?”, “Wouldn’t it be hilarious if all the athletes were forced to take performance-enhancing drugs… imagine that…wouldn’t that be great…?” And: “What about Jana Pittman’s knee?"

Her knee!? Perhaps, in the future, they can put Jana Pittman’s knee in the national sports museum so ordinary Australians can file past and spit on it. The Olympics are over now, so this is my jaded wrap-up of the month that was Beijing 2008.

You may be able to tell that I’m not generally overflowing with Olympic Spirit. If Olympic Spirit were alcohol, not only would it be impossible to get drunk on, it would also make you very, very boring. Olympic Spirit was the thing that made rational adults stroll through the streets of Beijing saying, “Wow! Look at that beautiful, coloured dragon. Boy, I feel like dumplings!” instead of “Hey, where did all the poor people go?”. It also made people cheer at swimming. I mean, come on. They’re underwater. They can’t really hear you. Most people can’t hear shark alarms when they’re taking an ocean dip and that’s a matter of life and death. I feel like getting on a roll here, so I am going to run down some of the more popular Olympic events before getting back to what matters; making money.

Cycling gave me the creeps. Men with heads shaped like sperm and legs like dolphins riding really slow… then really fast… because you can’t just have a race. No, what riding a bike needs is tactics.

Rowing. How do people discover a talent for rowing? Teleporting back to Elizabethan England? No, they learn to row at private schools. Enough said.

The Triathlon was only recently introduced as an Olympic event, probably by Australia. It has an Australian sensibility about it. We’re running, now we’re cycling, now we’re swimming. Jesus, make up your mind. Is it indecisiveness? No, it’s probably an Australian ideal of wanting to beat people at three different events but being too lazy to race them separately. The Triathlon seems to say, “it doesn’t matter how I do it, I am more than capable of getting from A to B”.

Shot put. Discus. Hammer-throw. There is a very good reason why, when you’re at a bar on a Saturday night and you ask someone, “So, what do you do?” they never, ever say, “I’m an Olympic hammer-thrower”. I have no idea what that reason is, but I know it’s similar to the reason why you never meet parking inspectors.

If there’s one event I would like to see carry over into everyday life it’s pole vaulting. Everyone should learn to pole vault. You’d never have to use the stairs or pay for a ticket to an outdoor rock festival again.

Gymnastics was semi-enjoyable, if you didn’t look too closely. From a distance it’s all lycra, ribbon-tricks and hairspray. Get a close-up and it’s all Romanian sweat-shop-esque brutality, eating disorders and a distinct impression that no, that girl wasn’t 17 years old, she was 42. Zoom out, zoom out.

Diving, though pretty much incomprehensible to most people (fall off a tower, spin, spin, twist then land hands-first and don’t splash too much) at least has the hip concept of degree of difficulty. It’s a concept that should have made its way into real life but hasn’t. For example, taking your girlfriend out to dinner is good. It should be rewarded. But taking your girlfriend and her parents out to dinner should be rewarded more. In fact, it should also be usable as a defence for doing something stupid, even if it is completely unrelated. It’s not, though, so that’s why people enjoy diving. Probably.

Then there was table tennis, which was surprisingly entertaining. If I’m not mistaken, our Australian representative for ping-pong was not Asian. Now that’s ambition.

Whether you enjoyed the Olympics or not, I’m sure you couldn’t escape it. It invaded the workplace; because sporting analogies are something the corporate world can’t get enough of. Train hard! Win! Success! Glory! I couldn’t help but laugh at the thought that, while management was feeding us that sport-is-the-same-as-business rubbish, a group of women in China were swimming underwater… at exactly the same time.