I sometimes hear people say they hate the Olympics.  How do you hate the Olympics?  Ok, maybe you don’t enjoy watching them yourself. But how do you hate seeing people work hard and achieve their dreams?

It’s like saying you hate charity. If their favorite TV show was preempted by Habitat For Humanity, they’d still be pissed.

By the way, most of those same people are perfectly happy to cheer on their favorite overpaid football players on Sunday afternoon.  I guess sacrifice in the name of love for the sport doesn’t carry enough weight for those sports fans.

I’m not a sports guy myself.  But I do enjoy watching people reach their goals. And to do it in a venue that also supports getting governments to shut the hell up and get along for two weeks? I think that’s worth pulling “Chicago Fire” off the air for a couple episodes.

Sure, it’s not all good.  You get these cities spending millions on opening and closing ceremonies that often leave you scratching your head.  They have to figure out how to leave out those years they were shitty to some other country.  Every country has done something it’s not proud of and the rest of the world knows it. They have to figure out how to gloss that over with a snappy musical number.

And look, Ice Dancing isn’t a sport.  It’s dancing.  It’s taking the regular couples ice skating events and removing all the cool/dangerous stuff.  In fact they could improve all the ice skating events by taking out all the parts that people don’t applaud at.  When the audience applauds, that’s the good part. Leave it in.

Nobody applauds in ice dancing until they’re done.  Because they’re done.  It’s like taking Downhill Skiing and putting it on a flat surface.  Which is Cross Country.  Which is literally like watching a guy trudge to work in the snow.

But even those events… I can’t do any of that stuff.  You put me in the Olympics and you’ll hear the commentator going “And he’s managed to go around the ramp! We’ve never seen a snowboarder completely bypass every obstacle on the course!”

All these athletes have worked hard.  Let them have their time in the spotlight.  We’re not even getting the whole story.  On March 7th, the Winter Paralympics starts.  They have an event called Downhill Skiing – Visually Impaired.

Holy crap… Go read that again…. VISUALLY FREAKING IMPAIRED.  Down a mountain!  Kjetil Jansrud can suck it.  I want to see (no pun intended) the dude flying down the hill blind.  That’s balls, my friend.  And there’s no money in that sport.  That’s all done for the love of the sport, and I imagine, emergency rooms.

So you can’t write off the Olympics with “I hate the Olympics”. It’s not fixed like all the reality shows.  You don’t need a good story to get in.  You just need to work hard and be really good at what you do. Or be willing to move to a country where everyone else sucks worse at what you do. 

I will now take my lazy ass back to the couch while I snack and watch athletes in far better shape than myself.