You may be surprised that an excess of stupid new sports doesn’t make my list of failures at the current Olympics in Tokyo. Taking middle school P.E. games and turning them into Olympic sports is grating. But it’s purely additive. If they add ten new inane events, skip them. You probably don’t get the oddly numbered Comcast NBC cable channel where they air regardless. By way of a hint, it’s the mesothelioma class action lawsuit infomercial channel. Asbestos is now a computer-scored air rifle competition for two weeks. Damn you both.
Nor will my complaint list include the men who are competing as women at the Olympics. It’s crass, selfish, and unfair, but it’s a spectacle. Tuning in to see if Laurel Hubbard literally busts a nut during a deadlift is crazy good television. Also watching commentators try to explain why there are no transmale athletes if gender really is a social construct is a rhetorical joy.
This list isn’t intended to entirely demean the entire Olympics. I’m sure there are people that find the Olympics a real joy and inspiration on the whole. Likely a young female who’s been audio-visually fed Simone Biles twenty-second biographies on social media. I get the inherent draw for girls for her story. And not merely girls. I know guys who cried watching “Dear Basketball” by Kobe Bryant. I mean, I don’t know them any longer.
The Olympics holds a special place in overhyped sports lore. An event so special it can only be held every four years. Billions are spent in preparation and casual bribes. We’re assured it’s way more than a sporting event, it’s an international caucus of people with good genes. The stakes are higher for the Olympics than any other sporting event. Massive hype is a setup for failure generally. Or specifically, these Olympics.
#1: It’s Called the 2020 Olympics But It’s 2021
Covid sucks. Blame the Chinese. Quietly and under your breath obviously unless you want a knock on your door from the government. Or your Apple phone suddenly stops working. The scheduled 2020 games were pushed back to 2021. Because somebody spent way too much money lithographing posters and t-shirts that said the 2020 Olympics, we’re now forced to refer to it as such in the summer of 2021. Unnecessary anachronism and space-time continuum breach.
#2. The Russians Are Still Coming
Geo-militarily, the Russians are and never really were the threat we made them out to be. Or that they pretended to be. Certainly not for many decades. That’s why they resort to cyberhacking farms and stories about how our President peed on hookers to get their barfight licks in. They are 1/10th the size of our economy (and China’s). What they do have is a long tradition of superior athletes. Both naturally born and PED enhanced. The Russians and former Eastern Bloc Olympic teams have always cheated. Not the only ones, but the most systemic ones. See Rocky IV for reference. It got so brazen and bold in Sochi in 2014 that the IOC banned Russia from having a team again. But here they are in Tokyo, being called the ROC (Russian Olympic Committee) Team. Any Russian not specifically found to have cheated can compete. And they are. And they are doing well. Because they are unmatched globally in swapping out pee sample technology.
#3. The Weather Sucks in Japan
It turns out the weather in Tokyo in the middle of summer sucks. Like the rest of the planet on similar latitudes, it gets hot and sticky in the summer. Even the panties in the vending machines are coming out wrinkled. And with global warming, make that hot and sticky climate +0001% worse. Many IOC members and their assorted concubines urged the Japanese organizers to push the games back to October when it would be cooler. But the Yakuza insisted the dead middle of summer was the best time for massive theft of foreign visitors and so it was set. Now it’s sweltering for all the outdoor events. If you like ass-sweat dripping like bacon grease down the backside of your male Peleton riders, the Tokyo Olympics are for you.
#4. The Tokyo Timezone Sucks
Tokyo is between 13 and 16 hours ahead of the U.S., so the timing on event times versus TV broadcast of live events sucks. I get that on the tiny Pacific Island nation of Nauru, this isn’t an issue. How much are their media companies paying for Olympics coverage again? Because NBC paid $7.65 billion for this hot cross-planet logistics mess. The result is either the broadcasting of events several hours after ESPN, Twitter, and my buddy Sal with the flip-phone have all told me the results. Or forcing athletes in Tokyo to hit the swimming pool for the finals at 7:00 am. The swimmers are bitching up a storm. This is odd for a group of people whose parents drove them to swim practice since age four at five in the morning to get in their three hours before fake kindergarten.
#5. Megan Rapinoe
Let’s not call this anti-woke, let’s rightfully call this anti-Megan Rapinoe. She’s an incredibly abrasive, self-serving, slacktavist, and serially oppressed ravager of female athlete genitalia who the media decided to make the U.S. face of the Olympics alongside Simone Biles. It’s unclear who Rapinoe relates to the outside of butch bar clientele and coastal white people who see the path to privileged dumb chick salvation. Rapinoe pulls in victim points Rosa Parks never could’ve imagined. And she gets to do it in the back of an Escalade, rather than a dangerous and dirty city bus. Rapinoe is way too old to be the angry teen who hates a nation that would dare turn a sullen and moody purple-haired indignant girl from the middle of nowhere into a rich consumer media darling. If she’s merely putting on the perfect oppression mask then taking it off at home as she counts her volumes of gold ingots, I take it all back. She’s an evil genius. But I doubt it. I’m penning her in for mopey irritant.
#6. The TV Channel System Still Sucks
Good luck finding the sport you want to watch on one of NBC’s 87 broadcast and cable channels. They still use that insanely obtuse channel guide metadata, “6:00 PM to `11:00 PM: Kayaking, Mixed Doubles Ping-Pong, Sculling, Softball Brazil Versus Jeffrey Epstein Pedo Island, Team Handball Semis, and Pachinko”. How do I know when sculling will be on? I don’t even know what the hell sculling is, which makes it the least boring-sounding option. But I’m not taking any chances of getting sucked into handball again. Not until that dude who plays against the women with a six-inch and sixty-pound advantage plods into the breach. It’s like watching a pack of Chihuahuas tries to take down a Doberman. If the Chihuahuas all had vaginas and the Doberman had a big shlong taped against its hindleg for femininity pass.
#7. The Endlessly Somber Backstories
NBC Olympics television producers ask each athlete one key question in the run-up to the games: name the saddest thing that has ever happened to you, and if you can’t think of one, tell me about the closest relative of yours who died recently. Segment editors get down to maudlin music and building a backstory of epic despair and morose connotation for every Olympic participant. “She thought her life was perfect until the day tetanus claimed her little sister.” You are a fool to think any Olympic athlete isn’t competing to honor their dad who died from a rare disease. But not the town flood where everything, including hope, was lost. Cue the pile of motionless puppies. C’mon, puppies, get up. Puppies?
#8. The Venues Are All Empty
During Covid, I mentioned I could care less if fans were in attendance at sporting events. That’s because there was no option. And no sporting events were taking place at all. Do you remember how many hours of college cornholing ESPN ran?. Obviously, nobody cared if those kids died. And I’d much rather watch a barren-stands UFC fight than none at all. But there’s no replacing the actual presence of a drunken, screaming, idiotic horde of thousands at sporting events. The dudes who paint letters on their bellies, the old guy with the 1950’s transistor radio earpiece wedged into his hairy ear canal so he can hear the radio call, the way you think the chunky girls who came without guys are here for a dating opportunity because you’re mush-brained on $12 Coors Lights. Empty stadiums and venues can’t help but connote failure. No band ever dreamed of playing an empty Madison Square Garden. It’s hard to escape how much the Olympics look like a Chipotle after the food poisoning “incidents”.
#9. The Norwegian Beach Handball Team
It’s taken me decades to come to grips with the fact that handball is a real thing beyond school P.E. class when forced inside on rainy days. Adding “beach” to anything only serves to delegitimize it further. This is why nobody searches for Beach Attorney or Beach Doctor when they’re in need. The reason to have “beach” versions of sports is to create a rationale for having fit dudes show off their abs and fit women prance about in skimpy bikini bottoms. There’s no athletic purpose to bikini bottoms, or Speedos for men (if you watch all the world record holders in swimming, zero in fluorescent banana hammocks). But there is a spectator reason. Nice ass peeks. The Norwegian Bikini Team, err, Beach Handball Team, refused to wear the standard bikini bottoms when competing in their fake sport. They’re being fined by the IOC for not showing enough skin. The singer Pink, who looks suspiciously like a Highway Patrol officer, has offered to pay the fine. Pointless women making pointless female empowerment points about hot Norwegians playing a made-up sport on the beach. That’s your modern Olympics.
#10. Lack of Novelty in “Athletes from Around the Globe” Memes
In the old days, it was fun to see what Slovenia had to offer in basketball. Or just to learn where the hell Slovenia was. It’s not just a fake country setting for Marvel movies. Though still confirming. Now, all the best players from the four corners of the globe play in all the major constantly televised professional leagues. There is no Pele on some club team in Sao Paolo that exists only in obscure subreddit GIF lore. That kid at 13 is signed to a Euro junior pro team for big money. The best Slovenian and Slovakian and Serbian and Latvian ballers all now play in the NBA. Even the NFL has Australian punters and one dude from Korea playing somewhere on special teams.
The best athletes in the world are broadcast worldwide 24×7 for the right price or right pirate stream. The Olympics merely segment them back up by country of origin. Or where they once visited an uncle when they were four. Almost all of them seem to be University of Texas alums. The girl from Honduras is from South Boston and couldn’t tell you the capital city of Honduras with three guesses. The novelty of foreign lands is gone. When’s the last time you opened a World Atlas?
#11. The Casual Blending of “Sports” and “Games”
As I mentioned earlier, add all the new events you want, Tokyo Olympics. Nobody should be peeved at more options. My beef is with the casual blending of sports and games. A sport involves a physical confrontation. An offense taking on a defense. Sports were meant to substitute for a real battle. In contrast, a game may be incredibly difficult, but it’s you versus yourself trying to perfect a skill or a score Beach Handball is a sport. As hard as that is to write. “Shooting a 10-meter air rifle” is not a sport. It’s a game. A contest. I’m certain it takes great coordination, training, and eye-hand coordination. So does manufacturing a semiconductor chip. Unless somebody is trying to knock the soldering gun out of your hands when assembling, it’s not a sport.
#12. Bikinis and Female Empowerment
While the Norwegian Beach Handball team bitched about having to wear bikini bottoms, the Beach Volleyball gals wanted to wear bikini bottoms. And complained that there were too many rules for all the women fashioned by the patriarchy who both like to show off and cover up women at the same time. Whimsical demons they. Thankfully, all the gals got together after the PTA meeting and agreed that “agency” would be granted the female athletes to wear shorts or bikini bottoms or even early 90’s MC Hammer genie pants at their discretion. The American ladies decided to go with bikinis because, despite the wedgies, they don’t hold sand, also they designed their own and they’re on sale at Target. This beach sports uniform policy allowed an entire series of inane empowerment articles to be written about how female athletes are still second-class citizens. Nobody noted that men also have strict uniform rules or that the word uniform actually means just that. The outrage hashtag balance is decidedly female.
#12. Osaka Lost
Here’s the problem with sports. Or games, in the case of half of the Olympics events. Except when the mob is fixing the outcome, you really don’t know how things are going to turn out. Naomi Osaka was the darling of the lead-up to the 2021 Olympics. She was born in Japan and raised in the U.S. The perfect bridge between the incredibly racist Olympics host country and the moron woke country paying for all the TV rights. Osaka’s star rose a few weeks ago when she quit the French Open due to the mental stress of press conferences. You know, like LeBron or Brady often do mid-Championship games. Since women tend to qualify each other’s worth based on illness and unfortunate circumstances, she jumped many Q points in popularity. They even let her light the Olympic cauldron. It’s the very metal urn they used to hide the Korean sex slaves in during WWII. Then, Osaka lost in tennis to a Czech player who’s ranked 42nd in the world. That full-circle story got crushed. NBC responded by crying and pushing ads for their next version of This Is Us.
#13. Then Simone Biles Quit
Remember that weird story at a New York high school where one cheerleader came down with undiagnosed tremors and even partial paralysis, and then another teen girl at the school, then another, and within weeks, eighteen were afflicted by this illness doctors couldn’t diagnose. The town was in a panic. Something in the drinking water? Nope. The power of group suggestion, panic, and fear. It was entirely psychological. That seems to be happening to high-profile female athletes. Simone Biles, the absolute mega-media darling of the Olympics, 5x Osaka in corporate media points, quit the U.S. team gymnastics team competition. That one the U.S. almost always wins and they take an epic photo and put it on impossibly corn-syrup saturated breakfast cereals. Biles apparently practiced a vault, lost her concentration, and landed awfully. She decided the immense mental health pressure meant she had to step aside. We’re not supposed to make fun of that decision. We’re supposed to laud it. If for no other reason than China can see we’re not really a threat to their global domination plans. Chinese girls don’t quit gymnastics mid-tourney. At least none that are alive to tell about it.
#14. The Aggressively Avante-Garde Opening Ceremonies
Like the rest of America, I missed the Olympics Open Ceremony. But its reviews were horrible. Which is something to be said for an entertainment category that is intentionally insipid and very Utopian-forward. When I think Olympics Opening Ceremonies I picture costumed dwarves on stilts while an announcer reads blandly from a script about how we just entered 2,000 B.C. Is that inspiring soundtrack a special score by the nation’s most prolific futurist composer? Olympic Opening Ceremonies are like finding out you have a third testicle. Wrestle with that.
#15. What Covid Done Did
Positive Covid tests, whether accurate or not, have already felled a bunch of athletes. This includes Bryson DeChambeau, that guy who comes along in golf once a decade with upper body strength so golf fans can pretend these duffers really hit the gym hard. Then there are the omnipresent masks. The last time we saw this many face masks at the Olympics Israeli athletes were being kidnapped. That’s a joke. Also, historically accurate. And finally, the shots of families back home with grandma hopped up on 5-Hour Energies for those 3 am cheer for our little Zoom athlete. Even Jeffrey Toobin isn’t stroking to that. It’s Covid theater and it’s a downer.
#16. The Olympics Are Getting Old
The last time the Olympics took a break it was for about 2,000 years. They started up again 120 years ago because some French guys thought it would be a chance to win some medals as their colonial empire started to crumble abroad. Also, a great excuse for rubbing other grown men with linaments. Sports and entertainment offerings seem to go on forever, but calendar-timed special annual events like the Oscars are waning like The Olympics. Much of this is incorrectly attributed to “woke” obnoxiousness, but much of it is simply fatigue. The Olympics are grandpa getting long in the tooth. For some infuriating reason, gramps is having bowel movements on the floor of the bathroom rather than in the bowl. There is a Circle of Life. Modern media and omnipresent professional sports offerings have made a quadrennial spectacle sporting event far less novel or mind-blowing. The dude who signed Madonna to his record label can now travel into space on his own rocket plane. Times are changing.
#17. I’m Getting Old
I remember Bruce Jenner winning The Decathlon. All the boys said how cool Bruce Jenner was and how they wanted to grow up to be like him. What did we all miss back then? Gender identification skills were lacking in kindergarten. Especially in the ’70s. Lots of boys wore chords. Shut up.
There have been a lot of Olympics since then. They even time-shifted out the Winter Olympics by two years to ensure we started having these international money laundering and hooker conventions in foreign cities every two years instead of four. I’ve seen more bobsled runs than any man who abides in temperate climates. I’m still not sure what the hell is going on. The same goes for half of the sports in the summer games. Why watch a six-hour bicycle race when I can get out of the house and sideswipe a hipster on a throwback bike bragging on NextDoor about how the planet is dying and he’s the only one who can save it. With his bike. That’s now bent in the back of my car. Now, who’s old?
#18. Japan Isn’t As Cool As It Once Was
Japan used to be cool. There was a brief respite in the last century when they started to bomb their big blue contiguous neighbors, but that was replaced by a modern Japan that really got into making killer movies, amazing food, and introducing schoolgirl fetish sex to the world. The big three. But at some point, China became the bigger boy on the block and a Communist dictatorship superpower with nukes. Korea became the trendier hub for spicer meat cuisine and boy bands in their 30’s and Japan got submerged in a pretty tough Asian Pacific division as an also-ran. It doesn’t help that they literally have the oldest population in the world. Most seniors by percentage as Japanese couples stopped having children. And they’re not so big on outsiders and foreigners. They are literally shrinking in size. The world population is booming and Japan is getting smaller. That doesn’t look good on the Zillow neighborhood value report.
#19. Two Middle Schoolers Already Won
Two 13-year old girls finished one-two in one of the skateboarding events where they call out the names of tricks that sound like 1970’s ice cream sandwich treats. You’d expect middle school kids to do well on the skateboard. That’s who I see skateboarding around here. That’s when I briefly skateboarded myself. It’s like the yo-yo or blowing immense Bazooka bubbles or discovering masturbation, all things to do and peak at in your early teen years. You really shouldn’t have an Olympics event where pubescent kids dominate. It’s never a good look to see kids beat adults at anything. Not for adults.
#20. The TV Color Commentators Are On Crack
Color commentators are inevitably former athletes from a particular sport. That doesn’t necessarily make them amped-up loons with no Id modulation. Pull back on the fanatical fervor for the fine points of your obscure sport. If people cared about these sports that require so much dramatic explaining, they would be watched more than once every four years. You’re a geek for how the thumb to pinky angle degree on the freestyle swimming hand mechanics. We’re not. Check Google search results. It’s “Pumpkin Porn” 874,000 results, “Optimal Crawl Stroke Hand Articulations” 0. It’s an amazing athletic feat any time a human being can wallop a 94-mph cut-fastball. Only a small fraction of a small fraction of people on this planet can even come close to doing that. But baseball color announcers don’t elate with an orgasm every time a ball is hit into the outfield. Keep it cool, Julie. I think they’re all named Julie.
And finally…
#21. Lack of Godzilla
In honor of the 2020 Games taking place in 2021, I’m throwing in a 21st reason the Tokyo Olympics are horrible. How does the King of the Monsters not make the cut for a jubilee right in his own backyard? Godzilla approaching Tokyo Bay is the height of drama. A Swiss dentist approaching Tokyo Airport to compete in the new Bouldering competition far less so. Just as the Godzilla movies started out super slow with lots of boring talking and explanations of how nuclear bomb (or their modern-day existential equivalent, seas rising by once inch a decade), the Olympics could use a pick-me-up from the prehistorical lizard giant. Suddenly, your mega sports event goes from drab to fab. Will Godzilla crush a few of the newly constructed Olympic venues? Likely. Good news though. They’re all empty.
