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 !
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Olympic swimming, Munich, 1972, Mark Spitz: I was in love. I decided I was going to marry him. I watched every move of every muscle in his body.
ReplyDeleteHowever, the closest I ever came to him was that I visited that same pool where he collected all those medals in 2004. Mark was no longer there... :-(
Those Olympic swimmers swim exactly the same way I do at my local pool. Well, maybe not exactly the same way.
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