Small Shelly Fauna

I, personally, am going to spit in every fiftieth burger

So basically, the Olympics suck. I'm proud to announce that I have not seen a single Olympic event this year, nor will I. It's not that I hate the games themselves, mind you, I hate what they've come to represent. A celebration of the glory of sport and the pinnacles of human athleticism. The Olympics that I knew and loved weren't about "doing it for love of the game" and "just wanting to try your best." Hell no. They were about one thing and one thing only: winning. Specifically, kicking the ever-loving snot out of the Communists, the U.S.S.R. most especially. Ever since the Berlin Wall fell, the Olympics have just been getting lamer and lamer. The fall of Communism is the fall of the Olympics. The menace...and exoticism...of the Iron Curtain was lost to us forever. As Wayne Campbell once so astutely remarked, Katarina Witt became significantly less hot after German reunification. Oh, sure, early in the '90s I was still giddy enough with the events of the previous decade to get excited every time the games came around, and that interest was momentarily bolstered by the appearance of the Dream Team, but things just went downhill after that. Because of the extremely spaced-out nature of the Olympics, it took me quite a while to realize just how far they had fallen. Indeed, it took until 1998's Nagano winter games for me to lose all interest in the Olympics whatsoever. The combination of utterly eventless "events" and a miserable presentation by CBS made for one of the most unwatchable rounds of televised sports to ever hit the air. (How bad was it? It had less Bob Costas but even more suck. Noodle that one!) To this day "Nagano" remains a disparaging colloquialism among the groups I travel in. "Man, that concert was a real Nagano, eh?", you might say to express your distaste. Or, "Boy, that guy sure Naganoed it up." And what was the big story of the 1996 Atlanta games? That's right, a bombing. You can make a Richard Jewell joke on late night TV and it still gets laughs, but mention Kerri Strug and nobody knows, or cares. (The 1996 Olympics also marked the first time IOC head Juan Samaranch did not refer to that year's games as "the best ever". Even he knew!) And don't even get me started about that whole Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding thing. That was hilarious, yes, but hardly Olympian.

I wasn't alive for the 1980 "Miracle on Ice", but I saw many a Dolph Lundgren-esque ne'er-do-well bested by Our Boys over the course of that decade. And yeah, sometimes we lost, but we, as a nation, made that our strength: we gnashed our teeth and swore vengeance. Do we still call for vengeance in a totally cool, solving our differences through sports like late-period He-Man episodes way? Of course not. When a nation loses at Ice Dancing, all they feel is a little sigh of relief that their country will not be known for being good at something called Ice Dancing. And you know, while I am vehemently anti-war on a military level, dagnabbit, we need an Evil Empire to take on at sports! It's not like our current quote unquote enemies can even field Olympic teams, for Pete's sake. Oooh, U.S. vs. Iraq in hockey, wonder who's gonna win that one? The whole potential U.S. vs. Cuba baseball thing sounds promising if they can manage to do it, but that doesn't help the Olympics as a whole.

Finally, there's rumblings these days of a bid for the 2016 Olympics in Chicago. Why bother? You'll just build some stadiums that you'll never use again, and believe me, you won't make money on it because if attendance trends continue, ain't nobody gonna be there. That is, unless a globe-spanning political entity standing in stark opposition to truth, justice, and the American Way coalesces in that time and we stop bombing each other for long enough to hold one awesome Summer Olympics. In that case, Chicago in 2016, baby!