Olympic swimming as I would like to see it

Is there anything more boring than watching Olympic swimming?  I mean, the only part worth watching is the last 50 feet.  Can your guy/girl hold off the challenge from the Godless ChiCom?  Can your guy/girl eek out a win by .0001 seconds over some Balkan swimmer whose name no one can pronounce?   Everything before that is 100% predictable.  The gun sounds, they dive in, then it's stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke...for 10 minutes until the last (sometimes) exciting 50 feet.


Of course, in many sports it all comes down to the final stretch to determine who wins, but at least before then there are a lot of variables.  In football you might see breakaway runs, long passes, fumbles, goal line stands, and always a grand strategy.  In bicycle racing you might see someone fall off their bike and get run over by the 50 people behind them.  And I find women wearing bikinis jumping up and down, flying through the air, rolling in sand, and spiking a ball over a net exciting start to finish!


Then there's swimming.  When is the last time you saw one of the competitors cramp up and have to be hauled off by emergency rescue kayak?  Or stop to pee?   Or dive to pick up marbles on the bottom of the pool?  Maybe if they were blindfolded and their coach had to guide them by yelling out "Marco" and the swimmer would answer with "Polo".  Can you imagine the chaos?  Yeah, I might watch that. But as it is now, B O R I N G !


S

They didn't think this through very well

We're days away from the opening of the 2012 Olympic Games in London.  I personally prefer the Winter Olympics because to this Texas boy, ski jumping and bobsledding and downhill skiing are pretty exotic sports.  The Summer Olympics with its running and swimming and spear chucking is something kids around here do from the age of 3 on.  Well, we don't start chucking spears until 6, but...it just doesn't seem that exotic.   With a couple of notable exceptions:

Gymnastics....I love watching the girls and guys jump 10 feet in the air flatfooted, then do 8 flips with 6 twists before they hit the ground standing up.  Dang....that's impressive!  And swinging around those uneven parallel bars, bending themselves into shapes that would put me in the hospital....again, impressive!

Women's Beach Volleyball....I love watching tall, svelte, tan girls wearing bikinis bouncing a ball over a net.  Actually I love watching tall, svelte, tan girls wearing bikinis just standing there!  


Unfortunately I don't think the International Olympic Committee thought things through very well when they awarded the 2012 Games to London.  Not because it isn't a great city.  It is!  It's a magnificent city I'd love to go back to again and again.   No, because it's too cold for the women's beach volleyball players to wear their traditional bikinis.  I've heard that instead of bikinis they'll be wearing the beachwear equivalent of long johns.  The athletes say with temps in the 60's they'll need to keep their muscles warm to prevent injury, hence the cover up.

I'm sorry, but this just ain't right!

S