Olympic Fever

So, apparently it's Olympic Season. I admit I haven't really been paying attention, though I did see a little bit of the opening ceremonies while at a bar (either I'd had too many beers or there were people in skin-tight clown costumes rolling around on the ground). And last night I saw some Japanese dude get like eight hundred feet of air on the snowboard half-pipe, though the judges seemed nonplussed (it's worth watching snowboarding if only to hear the announcers rattle off the trick names, which were clearly coined by stoned 12-year-olds. Ah, Jim, it looks like a double fakey nosegrab super air, though he didn't quite stick the landing on that twirlyloop mac n' cheese dinner). Speaking of snowboarding, wasn't the whole point of the sport to be all noncomformist and free-form and exxxtreme? If you win a gold medal as a snowboarder, do you have to pretend to be unexcited about it? Maybe even throw it back at the judges and scream "I don't care about your stupid gold medal, man. I just want to rock!"

It seems like rough going so far for the Americans, though, like I said, I haven't seen too many of the actual events. Michelle Kwan is apparently a quitter, and one of our best lugers got tossed out for performance-enhancing drugs. Which begs the question: what drugs, exactly, make it easier to slide down an icy track on a suped-up sled? Maybe heroin use could slim a person down and result in less drag? It turns out, though, the luger was taking Propecia, which aside from being a hair-loss medication is also a "masking agent" for certain banned substances. Poor guy -- it's bad enough he's taking the bald cure, now he has to be publicly humiliated? Maybe they'll also announce that his blood was contaminated by several erectile dysfunction drugs just to ensure he never shows his face in public again.

Maybe it's just me, but didn't people used to actually get excited about the Olympics? Maybe it was the Cold War, which gave us an enemy worth rooting against -- all the Russians looked vaguely like Dolph Lundgren in Rocky IV, and of course they were all just as doped up and Evil. Who do we have to root against now? The French? Maybe if the Iraqis managed to field a kick-ass speed-skating team, people would watch.

Or maybe not. I just hope this doesn't mean The Office will be pre-empted.