Olympics

Winter Olympics 1928, St. Moritz

The British South Pole Vaulting Team

I rarely watch the Olympics, either.

I can watch all the professional sports I want at other times, and I don't like all the media chicanery compressed into the short time that the Olympics take place. I can watch NHL hockey anytime in the months with "e" and "a" in them without the Olympics. Same goes for basketball in the summer Olympics.

I did watch some Sochi this year. What did I get for it? I got to see Shaun White slide into a fate that had already been telegraphed to everyone who cares about such things when he had cut his long hair - vermilion red and Samson-luxuriant. I mean, who did not see that coming? The young man sliding into short-haired middle age... just the kind of story that gets the blood pumping.

So I do not particularly like the professionalism and the money associated with it. So? I was asked how do I think those kids that start when they are 4 years old and practice at dawn for five hours a day for sixteen years manage to do it? How do their parents pay for it all?
Don't care. In the old days of amateurism, people had lives that were not Sporty Obsessive Compulsively Disorders, and the stop watch did not need to keep track of one-ten-thousandth of a second.

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