I think that it's my lack of patriotism that made the Olympics strike me as completely uninteresting this year. I still remember the heroes of twenty years ago, though: Mary-Lou Retton, Mitch Gaylord, Kurt Thomas, Greg Louganis, Carl Lewis... I remember them so well because they were winners, and that meant free food from McDonald's. You think you do well when McDonald's Monopoly happens every year? 1984 had the United States send a truly amazing Olympic team, and McDonald's promotion comprised of pieces that essentially said, "If the U.S. wins a medal in this event, you get this, this or this," with those three items varying in value depending on whether we won gold, silver or bronze. I don't know if McDonald's knew this going into the promotion, but the United States was going to run roughshod over a lot of the competition because the U.S.S.R. boycotted the Olympics, just as we had boycotted the Moscow Olympics.
In any case, they were heroes, because they ended up on more than just Wheaties boxes.
- Okay, so Carl Lewis basically ended up on a Wheaties box.
- Greg Louganis gained fame as a posterboy after he developed HIV, which isn't a good thing at all, but it at least puts a recognizable face on the disease, thereby promoting awareness.
- Mary-Lou Retton ended up getting children to exercise on Mary-Lou Retton's Funfit! which ran for something like fifteen minutes on Saturday mornings, splitting the half-hour between cartoons with Menudo. ... Yes, I said Menudo.
- Mitch Gaylord ended up in the movie American Anthem, opposite the extremely hot Janet Jones; she who later betrayed me by marrying Wayne Gretzky.
- But Kurt Thomas wins the award for Outstanding Post-Olympic Career Move, in that he starred in the movie Gymkata, which got a whopping 2.7 stars out of 10 on the Internet Movie Database. I mean, the movie is bad.
And then there was Table Tennis. That's right, it's still an Olympic Event, just like Synchronized Swimming and Water Polo, all three of which garnered about ten seconds of coverage on NBC over the last two weeks. Every year, the International Olympic Committee (or whoever the hell they are) adds sport after retarded X-Games sport to the list of Olympic competition, and they never take any of them off.
I mean, the fucking Equestrian is still in the Olympics. That's not a sport! The horse does all the fucking work! Seriously, give me one of the Budweiser Clydesdales, and I'll just plow right through all the shit that those pansy horses have to jump over. Gold medal for Umgawa in 2008!
Probably the one Olympic sport that I was most looking forward to this year was Girls On Trampolines. That's right, the very activity from The Man Show that drew the ire of women everywhere is now an Olympic sport. Unfortunately, when it went to becoming a competition rather than just entertainment, that meant that it was going to be performed by "athletes" instead of The Man Show's "juggies," which knocks the appeal down ... about to zero. I mean, if only Sweden had made it past the preliminaries.
So, over the next four years, we can look forward to a lot of things:
- The Winter Olympics in 2006, which will feature at least as many retarded sports as the Summer Olympics offer.
- Michael Phelps will find out that nobody gives a shit how many medals he won; Mark Spitz is still better.
- All-Around Gymnastics gold-medal winner Paul Hamm will make his motion-picture debut in Son of Gymkata.
- And, the United States' Men's Basketball Team will go back to the pros, forget all of this Olympic stuff ever happened, and get back to doing what they do best: Knocking up groupies and making a lot of bling.
