ESPN.com - Can't pull Olympic wool over my eyes

ESPN.com: Page 2

Tuesday, February 5, 2002
Updated: February 7, 3:40 PM ET
Can't pull Olympic wool over my eyes

By Bob Halloran
Special to Page 2

You like to watch. I know you do. But why? The Olympics are a bunch of so-called "sporting" events nobody cares about performed by people we've never heard of. It's a large scale Tour de France -- making it a Tour de Farce! In much the same way nobody could give a flying rat's derrière (that's French) about bike racing until a bunch of unknowns clad in pink and orange Spandex start racing through the Pyrenees, we now have Olympic snowboarding, biathlons, ice dancing, always-popular curling and the all-new skeleton. More on this later.


	U.S. TV viewers will be playing peekaboo with Picabo Street.

An actual headline for a news story previewing the Games read: Pogue edges Klug for Olympic berth. Boy, that was a shocker! Didn't you really think Klug was going to beat Pogue? The story was referring to a couple of snowboarders, and Chris Klug -- who did make the Olympic team -- had a liver transplant in May of 2000. So, to be fair, Klug is a great human-interest story which, after all, is what the Olympics need to have in order to be at all compelling. All those personal profiles filling the gaps between events are designed to teach us who the athletes are and why we should care about them.

The Olympics have been branded. They are an event. We have been told and retold that the Olympics are a big deal, so like good little mice following the flute-playing media conglomerate we get in line and follow right along. We're not mice. We're sheep. And now we get the "shear" excitement of watching two weeks of baaa-aaa-aaa-d television!

But why do we watch? Or more accurately, why do you watch? I'll have no part of it. I'm just not that interested in whether this will be Picabo Street's last race or not. By the way, she truly was named after the children's game of peek-a-boo. Apparently, it was going to be Picabo Street if it was a girl, and Pull My Finger Street if it was a boy.

Every four years, we're deluged with new names and faces promising us great things, and more often than not, we're disappointed. You'd think it was a presidential election. They roped us in with Dorothy Hamill in 1976. She was a great skater, but it was her hair that mattered. Life magazine called her "wedge" hairstyle one of the most important fashion statements of the last 50 years -- at least until J-Lo went to the Grammys.

Sarajevo gave us British ice dancers Torvill and Dean. They provided us with one of those "where were you" moments, like: Where were you when Torvill and Dean received perfect scores for artistic impression? Who can forget?

Remember in Calgary when Katarina Witt and Debi Thomas both skated their long programs to "Carmen." Oh, the embarrassment! What a riveting controversy that was!

How about Bonnie Blair? She won five gold medals in 1988, but a month after the Olympics, you probably couldn't have picked her out of a lineup. Conversely, today's NFL players are easy to pick out of a lineup, and many have been.

		You'll watch the ice dancing with a lot more interest than you'd ever watch ballroom dancing. But what's the difference? You think millions of viewers would tune in to see country line-dancing? Maybe -- if it were an Olympic event! Be still my achy-breaky heart!

"Why me?!" The most famous two words in pre-Olympic history. Nancy Kerrigan at the U.S. Championships in 1994 holding her knee and asking the same question I'm asking now: "Why me? Why are they doing this to me? Just when the relationship between Josh and Amy Gardner on "West Wing" was heating up, I have to learn about the new high-tech skin suits with coated fabrics and airflow-aligned seams that speedskaters will be wearing. This has really gotten my Jeff Gilloolys in a bunch! I need CSI-SVU ASAP and PDQ, OK?

By the way, did you know the new speedskating uniforms have silver-sheened armpits and groin areas to reduce friction? How come the rest of us don't get that? I'd like some of that in my business suits. Everything is designed to make the athletes go as fast as they can. Why not just strap rockets to their asses? They could all skate around like Wile E. Coyote chasing after the Road Runner. I'm sure Acme could come up with something.

I realize anti-Olympic talk could be frowned upon during this time in world history, but this isn't Jesse Owens raising his fist to Adolph Hitler, or the U.S. hockey team beating the Soviet Union before the Cold War turned into a Luke-Warm War. Our patriotism won't be able to feed off the dream of beating our common enemy. It's not as if Afghanistan is fielding a nearly unbeatable bobsled team. The Iraqi ice-dancing team didn't qualify. And the Iranian snowboarding contingent found it very difficult to train in the sand! So, how the United States compares to the Finns or Danes in the final medal count really won't add much to the patriotic fervor in our country.

You'll watch the Olympics, but the World Championships aren't even a blip on the sports radar screen. Why not? They include the same athletes competing in the same events. Of course, nobody predetermined for us that we're supposed to care, so we don't. I think the networks are missing out on a big opportunity there. All they have to do is put it on television, tell us why it's of major importance, and we'll watch. The U.S. viewing public will watch anything and believe it's amazing. Remember Scott Baio? Yes, you'll watch. You'll watch curling and learn that, just like golf, it was developed in Scotland -- which tells you the Scots are batting about .500 in the field of "sport development," and that they like their sports a little on the slow side.

You'll watch the biathlon, and think: "Yeah, cross-country skiing and precision target shooting. That was a natural. Two activities that blend together like a hand in a glove." Why not combine calf-roping and platform diving?


	By March you'll have heard enough about Yevgeny Plushenko to make your head spin.

You'll watch snowboarders competing in the half-pipe and you'll know we're "this close" to having skateboarding in the summer games. Tony Hawk can smell the gold!

You'll watch all the figure skating, and you'll be outraged at the unfairness of the judging. You'll probably be reminded about the protests last March at the World Championships during which fans chanted: "The judging of the ice dancing competition was a sham." Kind of a long chant if you ask me. Kind of makes one appreciate the elegant brevity of a "you suck" chant.

You'll watch and pay close attention to a series of news stories about athletes testing positive for hideous performance-enhancing drugs like antihistamines and caffeine. These athletes are forced to pee in a cup so often, they must be disappointed by the lack of a challenge presented when they get to use an actual toilet.

You'll watch the ice dancing with a lot more interest than you'd ever watch ballroom dancing. But what's the difference? You think millions of viewers would tune in to see country line-dancing? Maybe -- if it were an Olympic event! Be still my achy-breaky heart! Do you think that's possible? Someone should get to work on this.

You'll watch with great interest as Alexei Yugadin, Alexander Abt, Yevgeny Plushenko, Maria Butyrskaya, Armin Zoeggler and Yorgo Alexandrou do whatever it is they do. Geez, and I thought hockey players names were tough!

And you'll watch the skeleton races. Skeleton is the sport where racers go down the bobsled tracks at 80 mph with their chins only inches from the ice. When they start ice skating down one of those gerbil shoots, maybe it'll pique my interest. But until then, it sounds like another variation of the luge -- the incredibly redundant event in which each sled looks exactly like the one before it and the final times are about .0007 seconds apart. Yawn!

You'll watch the hockey, too. And so will I. Otherwise, wake me when March Madness arrives.

Bob Halloran is an anchorman for ESPNEWS.