Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Gymnastics at social commentary

On my post from last night, if you have any suggestions you better make them fast because I finally have a start date and, yeah, they want me a little quicker than I expected. Actually, it was the date I originally thought about but that was based on me not spending two weeks in bureaucratic limbo. So if you see me running around like a madman over the next few days I hope you’ll understand why. I’ll explain things further once I understand them further.

Olympic note # 1: Having the championship of the beach volleyball tournament being converted into a mud volleyball game is a move of genius. It still doesn’t equal my belief that all gold medal wrestling matches should take place inside a steel cage but it comes close.

Olympic note # 2: Has anyone noticed over the course of the Olympics how everyone: announcers, reporters, commercials has been pulling for Shawn Johnson and being rather upset that Natasia Lukin kept on winning. Now sure part of that is because Johnson was the defending world champion and the favorite going in. But let’s look at the difference between the two.

Shawn Johnson is the sparkplug with a nice smile from Des Moines. She fits that Mary Lou Retton role of being short and feisty while still being an all-american girl. You could see her selling any product, sitting on the couch with Letterman or Leno, and just being the face of the sport.

Natasia Lukin is stoic, nearly robotic and was born in Moscow with a father who was a gold medalist for the Soviet Union. While she is unbelievably graceful there is still this sense of grim determination to her performance. This is someone who is visibly upset about finishing second. While we don’t really celebrate silver we still want people to be happy about the end result.

Basically, since Shawn Johnson makes a better story they went into the balance beam with the story being “Shawn Johnson’s last chance at gold” rather than “Natasia Lukin goes to cement herself as the greatest American Olympic gymnast ever.” It was subtle but it was clearly there. NBC was hoping like mad that Shawn Johnson would win last night.

Olympic note # 3: While I was playing trivia at the time, the whole Champions Gala event for gymnastics is one of my least favorite things about the Olympics. We take time from the games to show performances that do not count for anything. It’s just an exhibition. I know it is the most popular sport but instead of showing lesser events all we do is show the same thing except now it isn’t even a competition.

Olympic note # 4: Best trivia question I saw all day. How many times in history has a white man run under 10 seconds in the 100 meters? Answer: 0, best time is 10 seconds flat by a dude from Poland is 1968. That just seemed to be a rather amazing stat when I saw it.

Wednesday Night Music Club: Ok, here is a tape of what is essentially my favorite KC concert moment ever (even though this actual clip is from a show in San Francisco). I was at Liberty Hall in Lawrence to see Rufus Wainwright and for the encore the entire band took the stage dressed as the Wicked Witch of the West. Crowd goes nuts and Rufus is a few lines into the opening verse and goes “Oh my God, we’re in Kansas!” Just a really fun moment and the clip shows what it looked like.

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