TV: Olympics 2004

I'm back from vacation, and you will probably be unsurprised to hear I spent a great deal of it watching TV (due to the constraints of having to plan all outside activities around the fussiness quotient of the world's cutest niece). And the majority of that TV watching involved the Olympics, which, as always, I thought I wouldn't give a rat's ass about, but wound up being totally sucked into. I haven't yet found a sport I've never watched before and totally fallen in love with it, as I did with curling at the 2002 Utah Games, but I've found an awful lot to love, and of course hate. Some thoughts:

-- Michael Phelps is a great swimmer and all, but how pointless was it to build up such a gigantic wall of hype around him, one which was absolutely impossible for him to live up to? I don't care how much they talked him up, if you did even the laziest of research, you knew that he never, ever, ever had a chance to beat Thorpe or Hoogenband in the 200M freestyle. Still, he set a personal record, an American record, and won the bronze medal, which is pretty spectacular -- but instead of triumph, the inflated expectations made it feel like defeat.

-- I thought I would like fencing -- women hitting each other with swords, how medievally cool is that? -- but the women's saber competition turned out to be confusing and irritating. Both fencers have lights in their helmets which flash when they've been struck, which you'd think would make things easy to keep track of -- but no. On almost every point, both players would land a touch, and both helmets would flash, and you would only know who landed a touch first by the fencers' reactions (I quickly came to hate silver medalist Tan Xue of China for her banshee shriek after every single point she won). And sometimes, the fencers' reactions were wrong: both helmet lights would flash, and both would cheer in victory, until the judge would declare which of them actually won the point. The obvious question: if it's possible to rig the fencing helmets like this, is it not also possible to rig them so that only the fencer who is touched first lights up? We can put a man on the moon...

-- The women's beach volleyball is so great it almost hurts. Four immaculately chiseled women in skimpy bikinis jumping and diving in the sand, and patting each other on the butt after every point? Yeah, sign me up for that. But it doesn't hurt that the action is also impressive, with Kerri Walsh and Misty May especially showing amazing athletic ability in their matches. And, unlike the American women's softball team -- which has shut out every contender, including mercy rule annihilations of Italy and Australia, and is steamrolling its way to the gold -- May and Walsh, though clearly the best, have actually had to fight for their wins, which makes the matches all the more exciting.

-- The men's beach volleyball is okay too, I guess.

-- Synchronized diving is lame -- as King Kaufman at Salon noted: as opposed to synchronized swimmers, who may be silly, but at least are doing something unique, "synchronized divers are doing the same thing regular divers do, only they're doing it in pairs, and they're not doing it as well as the regular divers do it." And I hate that so much primetime TV was wasted on it. But I love the technology devoted to it. The dive-cam, which drops the full height of the platform, following the divers from their jumps all the way underwater. The time-lapse photography, showing each minute flaw of the divers all at the same time. Has there ever been so much money and footage invested in something so totally lacking in worth or interest? Aside from Paris Hilton?

-- But I did enjoy seeing the utter meltdown of every other team which let the Greeks win the gold, and then watching them race around the pool in celebration, especially when one of them wiped out on the slippery tile. My brother-in-law and I had a field day with that: "Did he forget to put on his flip-flops?" "There's a sign posted right there: 'No running in the pool area!'" "Right next to the 'Welcome to my ool' sign." "Only it's in Greek: 'Welcome to my oolakamakalakapakis. Notice there's no π in it. Please keep it that way.'"

-- Yes, I speak in Greek symbols.

-- I didn't care for what little of the women's field hockey I watched. I don't know what I was expecting, what with "hockey" right there in the name, but it really was just like hockey, with the ball almost always right on the ground. I kind of thought they'd be tossing the ball through the air with those sticks, like lacrosse or something. And those sticks they use are way too short, forcing the players to be all hunched over to reach the ball. The chiropractors must make a mint off field hockey players. They either need longer sticks or shorter players.

-- I apologize to synchronized swimming, which I had previously thought to be the most boring Olympic sport ever. Because now I've seen dressage.

I probably have far too many other observations to make about the Olympics so far, but that's plenty for now. There's a thing or two about tennis I'd like to get to, and I haven't even mentioned gymnastics yet. More later.