The 29th Olympic Summer Games began yesterday, meaning that Americans are now finding themselves in front of their television sets, enraptured by the endorphin rush than can only be brought by bitching that Deal Or No Deal won’t be on for two whole weeks.
I recognize that there are people who get excited by the Olympics, but I am not one of them, because I am not an Olympic athlete, related to an Olympic athlete, or sexually excited by male gymnasts. And since the only people sexually excited by female gymnasts are too busy trading encrypted child pornography in IRC channels to tune in, I’m guessing we can expect NBC to bitch about low Olympic ratings again this year.
Don’t get me wrong; back in the 80’s, the Olympics used to excite me. Of course, I was twelve. When you’re twelve, you can watch the Olympics and think that maybe you’ve still got a chance to be in them someday. Today, I’m thirty-seven, and looking at the list of events, the only one I could still get in on the ground floor of is shooting, and even then, only if you spotted me the broad side of a barn. From the inside. And put pictures of Dane Cook and Carrottop on my targets. And let me use a machine gun, because cocking a rifle sounds a little too much like exercise after fifteen years of two packs a day.
(Speaking of which: take a look at that list. Table tennis, badminton and fucking beach volleyball are Olympic sports now. Frankly, if you can’t see the slippery slope inherent in the Olympics recognizing activities that they force you to do to kill time at Boy Scout Camp as legitimate sports, you’ll deserve it in 2012 when you accidentally catch the medal round for Doubles Circle Jerk)
Back in the 80’s, the Olympics were fun to watch because, as an American kid, I wanted to see the filthy Commies get stomped. People who grew up in the 90’s don’t understand what it was like to grow up with the President of the United States saying that we were the generation that would experience Armageddon (Although, based on Reagan’s later diagnosis, it’s entirely possible that he believed that Armageddon was a brand of canned beef stew), and generally wondering every night when you went to bed whether or not you would wake up in the middle of nuclear winter with big clumps of your hair and testicles falling out.
So it was empowering, particularly back in 1984, to watch America fucking dominate every single event. It should tell you something about our national attitudes and fears that we made Mary Lou Retton – a girl with obvious and disastrous human growth hormone imbalances and a constant grin that spoke of a gritty determination to ignore the voices in her head – a national hero rather than the model for a Batman villain.
Since the Cold War ended, it’s had to crank up that kind of level of excitement over stomping out enemies on the athletic fields. There’s no sense of national accomplishment or beating insurmountable odds in whipping the Yemenis in yachting. Not when we have Deca-Durabolin, and our enemies idea of a performance enhancing substance is Gelignite.
Which frankly, is the other downer about watching the Olympics these days: on an infinite time line, the probability that any random gold medalist you see will have his or her medal stripped for performance enhancing drugs approaches one.
I’ve looked at the list of banned substances, and apparently no one in America is now allowed to be an Olympic athlete. They’ve banned practices that promote “enhancement of oxygen transfer”, which means that I’m now out, even for shooting, because I just picked my nose. Testosterone intake is a no-no, which explains why Tonya Harding would never give me a blowjob even in spite of my offer to pay in Euros for the videotape. Booze and weed are banned even though the only performances they’ve ever enhanced are stand-up comedy, humor blogging, or blowjobs by Tonya Harding.
(I’m kidding; I would never offer Tonya Harding Euros for oral sex. I saw her tape with Jeff Gilooley and watching Tonya Harding give head is like watching piranha strip the flesh off a cow. But I digress…)
They stripped the medals off of 27 people in the 2004 Games in Athens for doping… including an Irish dude named Cian O’Connor who won the Gold for horse jumping because his horse tested positive for anti-psychotic medication. They pulled this poor bastard’s medal in 2005, when the fact of the matter is, they should have given him two gold medals just for having the balls to ride a psychotic horse. Actually, they should have tested his blood, because to pull a stunt like that, you have to be shitfaced.
So many people have either been disqualified or had their medals yanked that I think that the only way I could watch an Olympic event and trust the outcome would be if they gave out a medal for doping. Just round up a bunch of hulksters with more testosterone than Jose Canseco’s scrote and lock them in a room with a table full of human growth hormone, androstendiol and a stack of syringes. Contestants will be judged based on back-ne and penis-shriveling (not counting the penises growing out of their earlobes), and the first contestant to floss their teeth with a competitor’s carotid artery gets the Gold. I’d pay extra to see that event.
Actually, forget it. To be a fair competition, they’d have to put a bunch of liquor and pot on the table, which means a bunch of oiled steroid monsters giggling and hugging on TV, which puts us one step closer to the official Doubles Circle Jerk.
And once it goes legit, they’ll start testing for Jack Daniels, Viagra and Astroglide, which will doom my last real chance to be an Olympian, despite my summer camp amateur showing in the event when I came in first, third and ninth. And I won’t compete without my little pick-me-ups… unless, of course, they pay me in Euros.
[tags]2008 Summer Olympics, doping, performance enhancing drugs, steroids, HGH, human growth hormone, dark humor, satire[/tags]
