The Olympics

I know this is not food related but I thought I would post anyways. Erin and I watched a ton of the Olympics this year. I am not sure why but it just kind of pulls you in. One night I even found myself on the couch @ 1:00 am watching a great ping-pong match! We really enjoyed the opening and closing ceremonies. There were a lot of rumors about things being fake and lip-syncing, which turned out to be true. Not to mention the Chinese gymnasts that were 12,13, or 14! I mean 16 years old! I think it made it a lot easier for me to watch the Olympics because I realize it is all about the $$$$$$$ for the TV channels and gold medals for the countries no matter how you get them! Nothing else matters! I do not agree with it, but I can not change that. The IOC is such a dirty organization I do not think it will ever be fixed! I found this great article from Ray Ratto on http://www.cbssportsline.com. I thought it was a great read:


Well, the Olympics are over, and we only dislike and distrust the Chinese and Russians a bit more than we did before, thus making the Games a success.

That is, if not getting the planet incinerated is your goal for any Olympics. If you're looking for fair play, honest competition, understanding and the joy of young people gathering together to give the peoples of the world hope for the future -- well, the Olympics have always been a bad place to shop for that anyway.

As a place to cash in and meet scads of young attractive women, the Olympics can be very helpful. Ask Michael Phelps. As a place to become inundated with NFL offers to get one's brains beaten in returning kickoffs, they can work quite well. Ask Usain Bolt.

But as a place to find 14-year-old gymnasts, 12-year-old gymnasts, 10-year-old gymnasts and even zygote gymnasts, the Olympics are the best. A place to find corrupt boxing officials who are so helpless now that they even fight in press conferences to prove it, you can't find a better spot.

For athletes who object to their results by kicking the referee in the face, it is Nirvana. A place to find Jacques Rogge lecturing one man on inappropriate celebrating while one entire sport is being judged by drunks, pimps and rounders ... well, where else would you find Jacques Rogge?

To find media people who alternate between raving about the charm of a new culture and slagging it through ignorance, you've found the right window. To find twelve-hour old events passed off as live ... well, the NFL Network shows three-day-old exhibition games, but that's hardly the same. And specifically this time, it was a good place to find repression with a smile.

The Beijing Olympics did, on a slightly grander scale, what every other Olympics has ever done -- make some people rich, irritate others, and remind us in general that sport doesn't change the world, it just entertains it a while before we all get back to our principal duties of misunderstanding, slandering, swindling, punishing and killing each other. That it provides a little something for everyone along the way is just an added bonus.

Phelps will make upwards of $100 million in a sport most Americans care nothing about under any other circumstances. That will be a fraction of what NBC takes in for glomming on to him early, flogging him like he was Miley Cyrus with gills, and having him crush the hype for an entire week. Bolt won't make nearly so much, because of the lack of buildup, the lack of American citizenship and our eagerness to assume that any track person is one with a needle, but he'll get rich, too. A couple of American gymnasts might cash in a bit, and a couple of others will be stalked by people with iPhones hoping to catch them in bathing suits.

Some athletes will take their nanosecond of fame and their lifetime memories and be happy. Others (the U.S. softball team comes immediately to mind) will have one bad day stick in their throats for years. Many will take their seventh-place finish in a quarterfinal heat and go on with their lives. Why, some might even find a use for their share of the 100,000 condoms the Chinese Olympic Committee provided for them.

In short, what we're saying is this: If you're looking for a greater enduring meaning from these Olympics, you won't find it. The Olympic machine is getting closer to the NFL ideal, which is that you can have a hundred scandals and still pass them off as paper cuts and get a lot of people to go along with you. It hums along as it has since 1984, when the U.S. showed the world how to turn a buck (which is what we have always done best), and now that it staggers the Winter and Summer Games, it cashes in twice as often.

Beyond that, the Olympics' true gift is that it gives a little something for everyone, while providing nothing close to what the pundits and officials say it does. Glory and shame. Triumph and humiliation. Semi-truths and quasi-lies. Spectacle and embarrassment. Nobility and corruption. All the things that make us one of the more interesting subsets on the planet, right there between jellyfish and plasma televisions.

Oh, wait, there is one thing we learned from these Olympics, and it is a lesson we should all embrace and hold as our own for all time.

If you're looking for a kid singer for your next wedding, anniversary party or sporting event, always always always check her teeth first. The prestige of nations have risen and fallen on bad orthidonture, and you know we'll go for the cute nine-year-old with straight, white incisors over the truly talented eight-year-old with asymmetrical overbite every time.

Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.

My last comment regarding the Olympics is as we were watching swimming, track and field, boxing, taekwando or any other sport I was amazed how many foreign athletes have scholarships at U.S. universities and actually train in the U.S with U.S. coaches to compete against us! If it were my choice I would have them banned from the training facilities and universities athletic facilities 1 year before each Olympiad, and any U.S. coach caught coaching them within that year would be banned from being involved with U.S. athletes. Let them pay for their own training and training facilities