Thank goodness that time moves quickly. We’re darn lucky the last four years of our lives just seemed to come and go. I mean, what did we really watch on TV when it wasn’t the Olympics?
Now, don’t deny it. I know you just couldn’t help yourself over the weekend–you popped on the tube and liberated your mind for a moment so that you could enjoy some solid women’s preliminaries in water polo.
Well, I sure as heck did.
What else could I do? It’s not like I could not have watched. What if I missed something? If that happened, it’d be straight out of the loop for me. No more discussing with strangers the amount of Canadian bronze medals. No more happiness and wonder derived from CBC’s wealth of human interest stories completely unrelated to the Summer Games. No more participating in the unparalleled world-wide event that is the Olympics, where nations put away their petty differences to sit down with family and friends to stare at the television screen and hope that their homegrown boxer beats the bejeezus out of the opposition. How could I cope?
So there I was, as I am sure you were also, sitting in a salsa-stained Kokanee T-shirt with Doritos close at hand (and a Math text nowhere to be found, I might add) watching Simon Whitfield thwomp the foreign competition in the triathlon. In a strange contortion of fate, I remember that I gave Whitfield a cup of Gatorade this past summer and he thanked me. Wow.
So I’m watching this man, whose life is so closely intertwined with mine, and I know that after a few weeks of intense practice, I could be just like this man. Now how could I chance missing that beautiful moment by choosing not to watch CBC last weekend?
The Olympics are fantastic. They are the brilliant epitome of western civilization: seeking to achieve new heights of strength, endurance and cunning while reinforcing a concept of healthy nation-against-nation competition. They bring together millions of curious viewers (with the obvious exception of the synchronized swimming event) to watch the best amateur sport the international scene has to offer. They allow the average child to watch their equestrian hero demonstrate that you should read the ingredients of your favourite herbal medicine before you get your Olympic dope test, and should not get so depressed that afterwards you need to snort modest amounts of cocaine to solve your problems.
So if you haven’t caught any of the advertising-laden coverage of this year’s Summer Games in Sydney… what the heck are you doing? You should get off your high horse right now and jump under the bandwagon as soon as possible. If you wait any longer, you’ll end up sitting at home watching reruns of The Sopranos, wondering how much longer you’ll have to wait to catch the next Olympics.