The games in Rio have passed without me seeing nearly any coverage. I was trying to figure out when my indifference set in. Here's what I remember.
1976
These are the earliest Olympics I can recall.
That was a deeply American summer. My family had visited Washington D.C., there was a lot of bicentennial programming on TV, there were the republican and democratic conventions which we watched because, well... they were on. It was really just the summer of watching TV late with the lights off in our brick-walled living room -- which held the July heat like a pizza oven.
When you're seven, there's that sort of de facto patriotism that carries you along. Like, you just draw flags. You understand that if you see the character string "#1" without context, it means that you and your family live in the what is definitively THE best country in the world, as determined by methods that you haven't yet learned. If you're drawing a rocket on the back of a school worksheet, it's likely to be mistaken for a building or hotdog until you adorn it with the letters "U" and "S" and "A."
So, at seven, an age at which most able-bodied kids have actually tested their ability to run and jump against their peers, the fact that Americans are demonstrating that they can run and jump better than people from other countries is maybe the truest affirmation of that pride. And maybe this is just me, but I think it's the only time that it really seems pure, before a kid is flecked with the spray of geopolitical muck or sees a "Kill 'em All and Let God Sort 'em Out" bumper sticker.
My brother and I, with a friend from up the street, held our own small but energetic competitions in the yard, jumping across or over wobbly stacks of bricks or tires or whatever we had. There was a paper airplane event. There was an obstacle course. Kids love a good obstacle course.
We tied a rope across the opening of our garage, intending to break through it like triumphant Olympic sprinters and not intending in any way to be nearly decapitated and flung backwards onto the driveway. We made that mistake only once.
And yet, the thing I really think about is knowing that we'd won some McDonald's food every time an American won a medal. That was a genius promotion.
1980
Well, I guess I learned the word "boycott."
I remember being disappointed. And confused. Why not go over there and beat the Soviets at volleyball and whatever? It seemed weird to not compete against people because you didn't like them.
I'm a little embarrassed that I didn't remember the USSR boycotted us four years later.
1984
The Los Angeles Olympics were strange around our house because my brother was almost placed on the U.S. rifle team. How close? Don't know. Mister Along-For-The-Ride didn't ask a lot of questions about that sort of thing. My parent's divorce was really heating up at that time and everything seemed a little surreal. So the monumental event of my brother flying out to Colorado Springs and then to Los Angeles was sort of lost in the weird new emergent landscape. But the frequent trips to the airport meant that I, the unattended younger brother of a potential Olympian, could skulk off and play several games of Dragon's Lair at the airport arcade -- and it cannot be overstated how mad dope that was.
Once the games began, I started watching them with interest. Eight years, more than half of my life, had passed without seeing the summer games and I really enjoyed having that experience again. But a couple of days in, I realized there was going to be a problem.
I had made a pact with God that summer, the way spiritually earnest teenagers sometimes do. I'm not going enumerate the details of it, but it should suffice to say that my end of the celestial agreement was being complicated by the nearly constant and often slow-motion television coverage of Mary Lou Retton's thighs.
Years later, MLR (as no one calls her) became the celebrity spokesperson for a product called TV Guardian*: a device which recognizes foul language in the closed captioning feed of your video signal and then does sensitive viewers the favor of muting the audio for the duration of that word or phrase. Retton was presumably cashing in on the wholesome image she'd cultivated while flipping around in her little outfit and inadvertently casting me into the Lake of Fire.
Oh. And also, there was that jet pack during the opening ceremonies.
1988
Nothing.
1992
Drawing a blank.
1996
If you ever feel like the world isn't giving you a fair shake, you ought to take a moment to meditate on the experience of Richard Jewell. Here's a recap.
Richard discovered the Centennial Park pipe bomb and evacuated people from the area before it exploded. He was rewarded by being sued by two people who were injured when the thing went off, being considered in public opinion as the presumptive terrorist, investigated and searched by the FBI who felt it served the public good to disclose that Jewell owned an inordinate amount of porn in a time when the phrase "inordinate amount of porn" had not yet been rendered quaint by the advent of external hard drives.
My disgust and contempt for the people of 1996 who did this to Richard Jewell is, of course, also directed at myself. I totally thought he was guilty.
Although he was exonerated, Jewell was dead eleven years later at the age of 44. The New York Times article called him a hero. The Governor of Georgia commended him the year before. None of it really seems like enough.
I literally get a lump in my throat when I imagine an alternate timeline where Jewell survives long enough to light the torch at whatever city has the next American-hosted Olympics. Think about that, how good it would have felt for a nation to apologize to a single person on that scale.
2000
You could safely assume that every bit of childlike enthusiasm I ever had for the summer games had evaporated by the time they got to Sydney. Here's what Old Man Grumpus wrote in his journal that year:
Wow. What had bitten my ass?
1976
These are the earliest Olympics I can recall.
That was a deeply American summer. My family had visited Washington D.C., there was a lot of bicentennial programming on TV, there were the republican and democratic conventions which we watched because, well... they were on. It was really just the summer of watching TV late with the lights off in our brick-walled living room -- which held the July heat like a pizza oven.
When you're seven, there's that sort of de facto patriotism that carries you along. Like, you just draw flags. You understand that if you see the character string "#1" without context, it means that you and your family live in the what is definitively THE best country in the world, as determined by methods that you haven't yet learned. If you're drawing a rocket on the back of a school worksheet, it's likely to be mistaken for a building or hotdog until you adorn it with the letters "U" and "S" and "A."
So, at seven, an age at which most able-bodied kids have actually tested their ability to run and jump against their peers, the fact that Americans are demonstrating that they can run and jump better than people from other countries is maybe the truest affirmation of that pride. And maybe this is just me, but I think it's the only time that it really seems pure, before a kid is flecked with the spray of geopolitical muck or sees a "Kill 'em All and Let God Sort 'em Out" bumper sticker.
My brother and I, with a friend from up the street, held our own small but energetic competitions in the yard, jumping across or over wobbly stacks of bricks or tires or whatever we had. There was a paper airplane event. There was an obstacle course. Kids love a good obstacle course.
We tied a rope across the opening of our garage, intending to break through it like triumphant Olympic sprinters and not intending in any way to be nearly decapitated and flung backwards onto the driveway. We made that mistake only once.
And yet, the thing I really think about is knowing that we'd won some McDonald's food every time an American won a medal. That was a genius promotion.
1980
Well, I guess I learned the word "boycott."
I remember being disappointed. And confused. Why not go over there and beat the Soviets at volleyball and whatever? It seemed weird to not compete against people because you didn't like them.
I'm a little embarrassed that I didn't remember the USSR boycotted us four years later.
1984
The Los Angeles Olympics were strange around our house because my brother was almost placed on the U.S. rifle team. How close? Don't know. Mister Along-For-The-Ride didn't ask a lot of questions about that sort of thing. My parent's divorce was really heating up at that time and everything seemed a little surreal. So the monumental event of my brother flying out to Colorado Springs and then to Los Angeles was sort of lost in the weird new emergent landscape. But the frequent trips to the airport meant that I, the unattended younger brother of a potential Olympian, could skulk off and play several games of Dragon's Lair at the airport arcade -- and it cannot be overstated how mad dope that was.
Once the games began, I started watching them with interest. Eight years, more than half of my life, had passed without seeing the summer games and I really enjoyed having that experience again. But a couple of days in, I realized there was going to be a problem.
I had made a pact with God that summer, the way spiritually earnest teenagers sometimes do. I'm not going enumerate the details of it, but it should suffice to say that my end of the celestial agreement was being complicated by the nearly constant and often slow-motion television coverage of Mary Lou Retton's thighs.
Years later, MLR (as no one calls her) became the celebrity spokesperson for a product called TV Guardian*: a device which recognizes foul language in the closed captioning feed of your video signal and then does sensitive viewers the favor of muting the audio for the duration of that word or phrase. Retton was presumably cashing in on the wholesome image she'd cultivated while flipping around in her little outfit and inadvertently casting me into the Lake of Fire.
Oh. And also, there was that jet pack during the opening ceremonies.
1988
Nothing.
1992
Drawing a blank.
1996
If you ever feel like the world isn't giving you a fair shake, you ought to take a moment to meditate on the experience of Richard Jewell. Here's a recap.
Richard discovered the Centennial Park pipe bomb and evacuated people from the area before it exploded. He was rewarded by being sued by two people who were injured when the thing went off, being considered in public opinion as the presumptive terrorist, investigated and searched by the FBI who felt it served the public good to disclose that Jewell owned an inordinate amount of porn in a time when the phrase "inordinate amount of porn" had not yet been rendered quaint by the advent of external hard drives.
My disgust and contempt for the people of 1996 who did this to Richard Jewell is, of course, also directed at myself. I totally thought he was guilty.
Although he was exonerated, Jewell was dead eleven years later at the age of 44. The New York Times article called him a hero. The Governor of Georgia commended him the year before. None of it really seems like enough.
I literally get a lump in my throat when I imagine an alternate timeline where Jewell survives long enough to light the torch at whatever city has the next American-hosted Olympics. Think about that, how good it would have felt for a nation to apologize to a single person on that scale.
2000
You could safely assume that every bit of childlike enthusiasm I ever had for the summer games had evaporated by the time they got to Sydney. Here's what Old Man Grumpus wrote in his journal that year:
Entry 528
September 25, 2000
11440
Everything I hate about the Olympics was summarized in about 20 seconds of broadcast this past week. An American girl, attempting a handspring approach onto a vaulting horse which the Australian equipment techs had set a couple of inches low (in itself, pretty ridiculous) missed completely and wound up hitting the mat with every bit of skin between her forehead and her knees.
After a couple of replays, they showed tape from the camera that was trained on her parents so we could watch in slow motion as beaming parental euphoria dissolved into terror -- the mother mouthing ‘oh my God’, the father comforting her -- his own eyes full of fear... and the two of them wearing matching iwon.com hats.
Granted, the people at iwon.com who paid these people off probably didn’t anticipate their camera time coming through near-tragedy. But it is a ballsy ad exec who approaches a family with a value system so whacked that they would encourage a daughter to spend her childhood practicing something so specific that a two-inch variation in the equipment renders her thousands of hours null and void and ask them that when the cameras zoom in to watch their eyes glisten with the vicarious glory radiating from the vaulting, tumbling, dancing monkey they call their daughter that they be wearing matching hats.
And you know the iwon.com guys were pleased with the slow-mo agony of the parents. You just know it.
Wow. What had bitten my ass?
I read the entries before and after this one and saw that I had a stomach thing that was bothering me, so maybe weigh that in.
2004
Don't know.
2008
Can't remember.
2012
"Oh. Is that THIS year?"
The last four summer games haven't left any lasting impressions on me. In fact, there's so much coverage now that I don't make time to watch any of it. I figure the big moments will find their way to me the way everything else does, via sharing and posting and twerping and chompsmacking. You know, like the kids do.
I still like the idea of the games, even though they just remind me of Jim McKay's voice, watching TV in the dark and the subdued happiness of knowing that fellow citizens had misspent their youths just to win me a hamburger.
2004
Don't know.
2008
Can't remember.
2012
"Oh. Is that THIS year?"
The last four summer games haven't left any lasting impressions on me. In fact, there's so much coverage now that I don't make time to watch any of it. I figure the big moments will find their way to me the way everything else does, via sharing and posting and twerping and chompsmacking. You know, like the kids do.
I still like the idea of the games, even though they just remind me of Jim McKay's voice, watching TV in the dark and the subdued happiness of knowing that fellow citizens had misspent their youths just to win me a hamburger.
*I spent a considerable amount of time this weekend reading the user reviews of TV Guardian on Amazon, and then looking at what else those reviewers had purchased. It was, to put it generously, a bummer.
I'm determined to spend less time considering the opinions of people who habitually use the term "nowadays."
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