Five-ring circus: The Thread of the XXXIII Olympiad

Maybe Americans should stick to Bar Rescue reruns and leave the Olympics for more cultured folks.

 

My senior year of college, I and some other guys scrimmaged against the women's volleyball team because we were tall enough and could out jump them. After a full semester of that, we all started playing on a sand court at a nearby lake. My gosh, we played so much, like four days per week and all day on Saturdays. Doubles, fours, full-on six-on-six ... all on the sand. I was living on a 50-pound bag of rice and PB&Js (and Hamm's Light). I have never been in better shape. The next fall, when I was in grad school and volleyball camp opened, the scrimmage guys were beating the varsity women about half the time. Coach pulled us aside and told us to take it down a notch.

 

I am delighted not to produce an opinion about this for the sports commentariat today.

 

um, USA women's basketball waffling against Belgium

 

Belgium has a pretty good team.
Just me or did both teams get away with several traveling violations?

 

Did someone throw a Baby Ruth in it?

 

I am totally stoked for the Over the Line and 500 competitions at the LA Olympics. Hide & Seek, Ringolevio and Capture the Flag as well. They make as much sense as 3x3 basketball.

OTOH, Olympic Dodgeball would be awesome.

 

Too busy burning Tay Tay CDs to notice.

 

Bring back Tug of War!

 

In a different situation it really could have caught on here. It's not like it requires a lot of special equipment or skills, it's not hard to figure out the scoring, it's got physicality but isn't violent like a combat sport where you have to fear for your safety. We'll get a guaranteed spot in LA, so maybe it can be the women's rugby of 2028.

One person in this photo has shot vodka on live national TV and it ain't Snoop.

Beach volleyball's appeal is just weird to me. I loved playing on sand as a youngster, so I like the sport, but I much prefer indoor volleyball to watch, because you don't know where the ball is going, it and the people competing are much faster, and the gaps are much smaller. I think NBC has always been fond of it from a directorial standpoint. Even before Walsh and May it was kind of their go-to filler during slow moving shows. I don't even think it was for the minimum T&A, I think it's just not hard to cut a set of a random beach volleyball match in between the swimming and the gymnastics, for sunshine, some venue glamour shots.

Regarding the boxing, another angle that has been discussed but not here but that the sanctioning body of amateur boxing, which has a long and cherished history of being a shitshow that dates back decades, is run by some jagoff from a former Soviet republic who basically sold the whole operation to Gazprom. When the IOC told them no and stripped them of the authority to run the Olympic tournament, the IBF chair called Thomas Bach the "chief sodomite." So this whole thing could have been a Putin set-up.

In a detail that may interest only me, there have been 13 medals won by the former Soviet republics that haven't been kicked out of the Olympics this year. All but one of them is in judo.