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Chick Wit:
Gold Medal
Lisa Scottoline I admit it, I'm glued to the Olympics on TV. I watch during dinner as superfit young bodies tumble, dive, and backstroke across my screen, then I wonder why I don't look like that, and take another bite. I'd get the gold medal, if eating were an Olympic event. That's the problem with the Olympics. It's too hard to get a medal. You have to be in shape, then jump around on a skinny piece of wood, way up in the air, all after your bedtime. Or at least, mine. I started watching the Olympics at night and added MSNBC in the daytime. Then I found out that CNBC had events around the clock and Oxygen had them in the early evening. In no time, I was sitting on my butt 24/7, watching. Wrestling, vaulting, sprinting. Every night, I was exhausted from all that exercising. By other people. It got me thinking that the Olympics have all the wrong events. If they had the right events, we'd all get to run around. After all, who needs events like 400 Freestyle and Parallel Bars? Why not have Peeling Cupcake Paper Off The Cupcake and Maxing Out Your Credit Cards? Those are skills you can use. And what about Buying Chickens When You Don't Know How To Take Care Of Them? I'd win a gold in that event. I just found out that I need a new fence around the new chicken coop and it has to have a top on it to keep the chickens safe. Who knew? If I'd had a coach, he'd have told me that, but all the coaches are wasting their time with world-class athletes. The Olympics aren't about chickens, they're about excellence and world peace, though truth sometimes falls by the wayside. I'm not talking about truths like the homer bias in gymnastics judging, but more important truths, like these: In beach volleyball, the skill isn't spiking the ball, it's fitting into the bikini bottom. Someone needs to explain to me why these women wear skimpy bathing suits when the only sand gets trucked in from Nanking and the water is in Evian bottles. It's a fake beach, people, and they're athletes, not hookers. It's impossible to get sick of Michael Phelps. I eat up all the Michael Phelps coverage — the mom, the bulldog, the smile, the whole gig. The Olympics morphed into The Michael Phelps Show and reduced an entire nation to jocksniffers, me included. I'm buying cornflakes ASAP, and if they're frosted, all the better. I feel the same way about the adorable Shawn Johnson and her parents. Sell me something, Shawn. Anything. A prom dress, maybe. Synchronized swimming is a weird sport. I know it's hard to define what constitutes a sport, but if you wear makeup to do it, it shouldn't count. Also, the moves are scary and robotic and the nose-plug thing must stop. This could be the only event that hasn't changed since the days of Sonja Henie. And half of you will have to Google her. Race walking is a weird sport, too. I watched a horde of grim-faced women walking very determinedly and knew I had seen this before, on sales day at Nordstrom's. You shouldn't have to be an Olympic athlete to get a free massage. I saw what they did to Michael Phelps's legs, and no money changed hands afterwards. I want massages, on demand. When my back hurts, nobody cares. NBC is run by evil geniuses. Most of the time, I couldn't tell whether I was watching a qualifying heat (time to get a snack) or a medal event (wait five minutes to get a snack) because there was no indication on the screen. Then I realized that the lack of information was intentional, because either NBC wants me to watch the commercials or they read that column about my body-fat percentage. Crying people don't need to be interviewed. Nice of the cameras to spy on Lolo Jones, sobbing alone after she fell over that last hurdle, or to make diver Haley Ishimatsu talk through her tears. Ishimatsu actually cried as she tried to convince us she was happy. Next Olympics, NBC should replace the interviewers with a fleet of soft, warm mommies, who go out and hug these kids when they lose. Enough with the Agony of Defeat. A certain U.S. pole vaulter whose name rhymes with Jenn Stuczynski needs to fire her jerk of a coach, pronto. If you didn't see that tape, take it from me that the coach yelled at her for winning only a silver medal. Everybody's a critic, right? Like my editor says, where was he when the page was blank? Age is just a number, though some numbers are higher than others. Everyone's talking about Dana Torres, still swimming at forty, but what about Ian Millar of Canada's equestrian team? The guy is sixty-one years old and a silver fox. So what if he didn't get a medal? Ian, my email is below. And finally, if the medals don't count, why do we keep counting them? © Lisa Scottoline 2008 |