28 Aug 2004 The Olympics: I’d Rather Sort Socks

Jack Rich has a good post up on the Olympics, which brings to my mind a pet peeve about them from the other night.

Husband David watched a lot of Olympic coverage, while I hadn’t watched any. One evening, he told me I just had to watch one race. I didn’t really want to, because the laundry needed doing, but I figured “how long can one race last”?

Turns out, quite a while, because the officials couldn’t start it. Too much booing from the crowd for the starter sound to be audible. Booing of Americans, it seems. Unlike the whiners Jack Rich blogged about, these booers apparently weren’t upset that we led the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq. No, these — to borrow Jack’s term — idiots and ingrates were mad at Americans because some Greek dofus failed to show up for a drug test and was disqualified from the race. Following the world’s standard rule: Whenever anything goes wrong, Blame America First, the crowd was booing the American runners who had showed up for their drug tests.

Apparently, the purpose of the Olympics is to cause friction between nations. It was starting to make me hate Greeks (and just when I was starting to forgive them for adoring the anti-American demagogue Andreas Papandreou and their insistence on maintaining poor airport security, leading to incidents such as the hijacking of TWA 847 and the murder of the young American sailor Robert Stethem), so I went back to doing the laundry.