Olympic Fever

I have to admit I have come down with the Olympic fever.  Bad.  I woke up at 3:30am to stream the opening ceremony – which was well worth it btw – before heading out for the COSCA survey and PGH visit that I blogged about last. 

The interwebs are with me in my obsession.  My fb newsfeed and google reader are alive with updates of the games.  If I ever checked my twitter account I’m sure I would be positively inundated.  The people actually around me?  Not so much.  NBC may fail at Olympic coverage – but the Philippine coverage is downright disheartening.  The Philippines only has 11 athletes (2 swimmers, 1 boxer, 2 archers, 1 BMXer, 1 weightlifter, 2 runners, 1 judoka, 1 shooter) and only two of them are in a sport I actually enjoy watching.  More than that apparently people in the Philippines care about badminton and table tennis.  Also anything live is bound to be happening at horribly inconvenient times.  Furthermore the country doesn’t care.  I suppose people in developing countries have better things to worry about.

On the whole and with the average, however, I find professional sports and large competitions to be wastes of time and money.  Beyond teaching kids valuable lessons and providing a healthy dose of recreation I find sports pretty pointless.  The amount of time and money spent on professional sports and professional sporting events is entirely ludicrous.

So we come to the Olympics, which given the above I should dislike immensely.  But like I said I absolutely love the Olympics.  I have competed in many sports since I was little, some of them at very high levels.  I think lots of little girls dream about being an Olympic figure skater or gymnast.  It didn’t help that I actually figure skated and grew up in a house where figure skating champions were household names.  I definitely had Dorothy Hamil hair for a lot of elementary school.  Being a NCAA Div. I recruited athlete in any sport certainly gives you thoughts about the highest levels of competition of your sport, especially in a rowing  where several members of the national team are currently in college.  Even more than that I love how the Olympics is an occasion for countries to rally together in support of something and have a little good natured competition.  It also is an opportunity to experience, however indirectly, another country’s culture  - something I love.

Its an interesting mirror to be in the Philippines for the Olympics.  If I were in America I could conveniently ignore my discomfort with professional levels of sport and allow myself to be swept away with Olympic fever as I was entertained.  Here, however, I am unable to do that.  I don’t have any good conclusions about the proper place of competitive sports – but it is in interesting experience to be in a country which utterly doesn’t care.