the otherwhirled

I just wanted to say that I think it’s damn fine that our girls….okay, fine, young ladies, if you must….kicked some serious ass last night. And somehow, it’s all the more satisfying, knowing that they were beating up on little girls. Beating up on little girls can be a very cathartic exercise. If you haven’t tried it lately, there’s no equipment required. Just enter any gymnastics “training center” and start flailing away.

But seriously, Nastia’s medal last night was a hell of a deal. I hope she’ll get some time to be a normal kid after she returns home. Of course, it’s always funny seeing these “women” athletes four years later at the next competition, after they’ve “retired”, which I think is a sporting euphemism for “I developed breasts and hips and it completely threw off my center of gravity.”

I watched men’s gymnastics the other night, and was rather chagrined to hear one young man bloviating after the medal ceremony about how some invisible, mythological sky-being was the real reason his team had won a medal. This one always confuses me a bit, because if the dude had managed to miss a grip while twirling about on the uneven bars and land on his slightly oversize head, he’d have eventually uttered those inane words of it being “God’s will,” but he’d have never gone so far as to blame “God” for his failure to do his routine right. He’d have talked about how his shoulders maybe weren’t squared off the right way, or his wrist bands weren’t tight enough, or how he had a distracting wedgie scraping a cling-on up the inside of his ass-cheeks, but he’d never say anything remotely akin to “God made me fuck up.”

Take some credit there, young sports-hero. You’re the idiot who gets up at 5:00 a.m. every day to start working out. You’re the one who’s voluntarily foregone any semblance of a normal life so you can compete at that level. And win or lose, you did it. Yeah, and maybe your coach and teammates helped. But all the mythological sky-being actually does is suck up your sense of personal responsibility. It’s really kind of sad. And it’s very stupid.