Alien Olympics: I was entirely unmoved by the Olympics. Olympians are, by and large, inhuman. 12-year old Chinese gymnasts aside, even the older gymnasts are outliers. Grow much higher than five feet, or find that your spine doesn't quite curve into a perfect semi-circle? You're better off trying out as a Cirque du Soleil extra. Swimming, volleyball, basketball? If you're under 6'4", you're a dwarf. The skills and talents they display are impressive, but it can be like watching science fiction about a race of superior aliens.
There are some holdout sports. Certainly the ones that don't specialize so heavily -- decathletes are fairly normally structured because they can't afford to be to freakily specialized for one thing. Boxers are still boxers (I would argue that boxing is the most physically challenging sport) and their weight classes keep them looking fairly pretty normal. Sports that require rackets or more complex machines such as archery, rowing, or sailing are still accessible folks of normal dimensions, but those aren't big ticket events. The glory events are the domain of those in the 99.999th percentile of certain genetic predispositions. I realize that they put enormous effort into training and they wouldn't be there without all the hard work, but the freak-of-nature aspect makes it a spectacle rather than something to identify with.
But that's hypocritical of me. I am a huge NFL fan, and those guys are not exactly everyday ordinary specimens are they? So what is it? Why don't I care about the Olympics? Maybe because it seems so manufactured. Maybe because of all the treacley superlatives that emanate from every corner. Maybe simply because the whole mess seems like a multi-year PR campaign to make everyone stand up and shout "This is a beautiful and important thing!!!" and actually believe it. Then at the very end, we set the stage for the next one in four years by making Jimmy Page look like a doofus.
I do hope that Dexter, MI never wins an Olympic bid.
