I have always found it best to watch Archery while quietly sipping Vodka. Archery. It sounds so elegant, and at first it seems very innocent, like watching rich-person darts. But as the Vodka begins to settle and the thuck of arrow into target starts to make a deep and satisfying sound that speaks to your core, you realize how much you despise your job and suddenly it’s like, “Yeah, I really get the Olympic spirit.”
Table Tennis reminds me of a Wes Anderson film and I like to watch it wearing shorts and drinking coke. It makes me feel like a boy, a boy with an unlimited future where anything is possible including an Olympic gold medal in a child’s sport, instead of the middle-aged man who keeps getting ads for Gout medication popping up in his Facebook feed.
Sailing is a sport I like to watch while drinking gin and tonics. I usually dress for this event, in the sort of outfit that would get you beat-up on buses or in certain towns. Actually, I should tell the truth here, I don’t really watch sailing, but fall into a kind of glamour stupor with sailing as the backdrop. I dream, and yes, these dreams include supermodels in bikinis and helicopter pads and then supermodels not in bikinis. Long live the one percent!
Perhaps my favourite part of the Triathlon is the name. It sounds like a Japanese monster that took on Godzilla. Beyond that though, I find myself drawn to the hopeless masochism of it and the strange psychology that propels people through it. “No, I do not want to do one thing well, I want to dedicate myself only partially to three different things!” I can relate to that. It’s an event for the ADD age, celebrating the doomed scattering of ambition rather than the focused of achievement of excellence in one field. It’s what people who don’t expect to win a marathon, bike race or swim meet do, it’s a hedge. I drink chocolate milk when I watch, as well as play video games, surf the net for good Groupon deals and unload the dishwasher.
Beach Volleyball has finally been saved. I couldn’t watch it before as I found it demeaning to women. I mean, why did they have to wear bikinis? And why weren’t their bodies more like, you know, women’s bodies? They all looked like a tall, thin and often leathery species from outer space. Nobody needs that kind of objectification. Now, in sensitivity to nations where the female body is rightly feared, especially if it’s revealed to look like it came from outer space, participants will be allowed to wear more traditional Burqas or clogs or whatever flies in your country, religion, etcetera. This year Beach Volleyball will be a learning experience, and I will treat it with the solemnity it deserves, watching it while sipping tea in my library.
* PS: This was recently published in and written for Ottawa Magazine.