Center and Guard: Burning The Olympic Flame At Both Ends

I fully admit that I am addicted to the Olympics. It’s not just the overwhelming sense of patriotism I get while watching the Americans win that draws me into the games. It’s the opportunity to become fully engrossed in a sport that I wouldn’t give the time of day if it wasn’t on the Olympic stage. A few good examples of this are cycling and women’s weight lifting, which were the bookends of my Olympic watching experience on Saturday.


I woke up a little before 9 a.m. (don’t judge me) and flipped straight to NBC for their Olympic coverage, which happened to be cycling. Even though I didn’t watch one second of the Tour De France just a few days before, I found myself glued to the television and buying completely into the story lines the announcers were feeding me.


In the end, some guy from Kazakhstan won the medal and hopefully he got to hear his actual national anthem.Earlier this year, at the Arab Shooting Championship in Kuwait, a Kazakh athlete had to stand on the podium and listen to the rather offensive version of the anthem taken from Borat, a movie that did for the nation of Kazakhstan what Deliverance did for the idea of southern hospitality, which was mistaken for the actual anthem. Thus ends the part of this column where I tell you everything I know about Kazakhstan.


The day ended with me falling asleep to the dulcet tones of women’s weightlifting, specifically the 48 kilogram class. Like most Americans, the metric system still gives me some trouble, as in I have no idea what kilos are in pounds, but eventually the announcers helped me with some of the conversions. While weightlifting is something that I rarely watch, or participate in for that matter, it’s pretty amazing to think that a 106 pound woman can lift more than 250 pounds over her head. Plus the names of the weight disciplines (the snatch and the clean and jerk) make me laugh every time.


Saturday’s viewing will most likely be a prime example of my viewing habits for the Olympics this year. There will be a lot attention in the Herschelman household to the popular sports like swimming and track, but there will also be time for water polo, judo and handball, which kind of looks like a sport my brothers and I may have created in our back yard.


And watching those sports is probably as close as I'm ever going to get to actually being in the Olympics, unless useless trivia becomes an event in Brazil in 2016. But I'm okay with that. Even the sports that look easy take years, if not decades, of practice and preparation. In the end, while it'd be cool to have a gold medal, I'd much rather spend all that time at home with my family, where we can share in thrills of victory and the agony of defeat from a comfy spot on my couch.