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BEIJING. CHINA |
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GAMES EDITION |
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 The 10-member USA Olympic boxing team poses before the games began. Not one of these fighters won a gold medal in one of the worst-ever showings in boxing for American Olympians. |
hardly expresses it!
of TheColumnists.com
For most Americans, I suppose the 2008 Summer Olympic Games will be remembered as the year Michael Phelps broke all records in swimming, eclipsing the records of Mark Spitz, and brought home more gold than a Yukon prospector.
Not for me. Yes, Phelps was impressive, but I'll still remember much more vividly the time Mark Spitz made his epic haul of gold because Spitz was much more articulate, even if a bit arrogant, and didn't behave like a guy just released from a lunatic asylum every time he won.
I know. That's cruel. Phelps is probably a nice guy who just likes to yell and stand around with his mouth wide open all the time. He's not as classy as Spitz, who seems even classier today, but he's certainly a great athlete and a good deal more modest than Mark was in his day.
But I can't help it. I'm downhearted and depressed and finding fault with everything now that the 2008 Olympic Games are history, even guys like Phelps who did everything to perfection. I thought America tanked way too many times while China put its best foot--or feet--forward to win way more gold than anybody else, even if the USA did rack up more medals overall.
To begin with, I was really let down by the performance of the USA boxing team. That's my favorite Olympic sport and the U.S. has almost always given me reason to cheer myself hoarse. Not this year. Not one of 10 U.S. boxers won gold. Worse than that, only one of the 10 made it into the medal rounds.
That's not disgraceful, but what is disgraceful is the obvious fact that the boxing team was poorly prepared to compete. How else do you account for a fighter who couldn't even fight in the opening round because he was suffering from dehydration just trying to make weight? Who was monitoring these guys?
It was also disgraceful that another fighter decided to coast in the final round because he thought he was way ahead on points. He wasn't. Was he listening to his corner telling him that? No. He was listening to the crowd. Boo to him!
It was also disgraceful that so many of our fighters were expecting to score points the way they're scored in the pro ranks. Olympic boxing is a million miles away from the pro ranks. So many of our young men were trained as amateurs by trainers who couldn't wait to turn them pro. When they showed up at the Olympic training camp, they knew little about the Olympic rules and the fact that computers are now relied upon to tally points for punches.
If ever there was a sport where the USA needs to do a total overhaul of training procedures, it's boxing.
Our track and field teams, male and female, didn't exactly dazzle me either. How could both the men's and women's teams lose relays they might have won just because they couldn't pass the baton from one runner to another? When you make that kind of mistake, you blow any chance at medals.
In one event after another, I sensed that the USA competitors had not had enough proper training together. It's time for somebody in a position of authority to shake the USA Olympic tree and get rid of the dead fruit.
I'm also very disappointed in the way TV covered the games this year. I have no complaints about NBC's Bob Costas and many of the sportscasters who worked the main telecasts. But this year I had proof that the coverage by NBC and the cable networks that helped it cover the games were depriving us of much really interesting competition.
This year I watched Canadian television coverage about half the time because I now live at the Canadian border. The CBC coverage was infinitely better than the U.S. coverage because it didn't focus on Canadian athletes so much that we failed to get a feeling of how the games really were going. The CBC covered many events that got short shrift from the U.S. networks because U.S. athletes weren't finalists.
Sure, Canada didn't have anywhere near as many of its own athletes to cover, but it didn't have all the other networks it could spill events onto either.
Here are some other observations from this
jaded reviewer who has seen most of every Olympic Games telecast
since the late 1960s:
* The Chinese put on the best opening show I've ever seen--and
that includes the great show staged by TV producer David Wolper
for the 1984 summer games in Los Angeles. I'll forgive them the
"Milli Vanilli" stunt with the little Chinese girl
who didn't get to sing her own songs because she wasn't "pretty"
enough and had to have a cuter stand-in mouth her words. The
other stuff they managed to do was simply eye-boggling.
* That said, I'd like to know if I'm the only one who thought the famous "Bird's Nest" arena looked like a giant bedpan from the air? With all those "thorns" on it, though, I guess it resembled the sort of bedpan that only a mean-spirited Nurse Ratched-type would shove under a patient.
* Have you ever noticed how movie-star handsome the decathlon winners always are? I guess that's why so many of them--Herman Brix, Rafer Johnson, Bruce Jenner, etc.--eventually wound up doing roles in movies.
* Either I need my eyes checked once again or this year's crop of Eastern European female high jumpers--most of them well over 6 feet tall--looked like fashion models compared to the usual geeky jerked-leather types of prior Olympics. Maybe this is a pleasant result of clamping down on hormone treatments and anabolic steroid use.
* American swimmer Dara Torres had the most engaging smile of anybody in Beijing despite being treated like a "senior citizen" by most of the TV interviewers just because she's a healthy 41 years of age. Winning all those medals surely accounted for most of those smiles.
* If I were a young sailor whose ship docked in Jamaica, I wouldn't bother chasing any of the women they have there. They're so fast that they'd just "meep-meep" you like the Roadrunner used to do to the Coyote and leave you choking on their dust.
* I'm now totally bored by beach volleyball and don't care if I ever see another match again.
* Though it's certainly true that the USA women's gymnastics team held its own at the games, not one of them exudes the sincerity or charm of the Soviets' Olga Korbut, who started the craze for gymnastics in America so many years ago. I never saw so many forced smiles and robotic moves as I did while watching our girls perform endlessly in Beijing.
©2008 by Ron Miller. This column first posted Aug. 25, 2008.
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