The Thrill of Defeat

The Olympics are to a joke writer, what meteor showers are to a star gazer. A cosmic outpouring of material that does not come along often enough. Such a colorful convergence of intense emotions--the culmination of years of painstaking preparation, the triumphs the tragedy--and all so I can lay on the couch like a slug and poke fun at it. That's my job--and quite frankly--I need the job.

I'm not a mean-spirited man, I'm kind of a softy really, I'm not about to make light of the Nigerian Track star whose fiancŽ was killed in the streets of Sydney, after being hit by a bus. That's just not funny. But NBC seemed hell bent on bringing us an up-close and personal look at the agony of defeat. The disappointment, the heartache. All these personal profiles. "Orphaned at age of 3, Siamese gymnast Soon Lau Sup was raised in the gym. The dank basement training facility of one-time Olympian Hane Kee Pang became her home. Pang took the unfortunate child under his wing and after years of his strict tutelage, Soon Lau has blossomed into a fine young medal contender. Each night as she lay her head down to sleep on the cold practice mats, she dreamed that one day she might come to the Olympic games in Sydney, where she would finally have the opportunity to slip away in the crowd, and escape."

The terrible sadness all started with American gymnast and Medal hopeful Blaine Wilson. Expectations for the handsome young American were perhaps a bit daunting and the various apparatus had their way with the poor Yank. And every time he'd screw-up they'd cut to his sister in the crowd, her hands hiding her pinched little tearstreaked face, "Why, oh my dear God, Why?" And the commentators were no help "He couldn't stick a landing if he was a javelin." I'd like to see one of those bitter old has-beens stick a damn landing. Stick this. In a perfect world everyone would stick their landings. Enough with the sticking and the landing.

My wife found tragedy in a different area--she was terribly saddened by the poor Chinese gymnasts with their tiny little button wieners. "Hey they're winning," I tried to explain, "cuts down on wind resistance. Look at this guy, he's flying--how do you say that-- ÔMi Wee Dong?" She had a point though, it's probably why we didn't see many Chinese swimmers. There's no disguising a little button wiener in wet speedos. "Have you no hear of Shrinkage?"

Speaking of Swimming, it certainly was a proud moment for America when swimmer Amy Van Dyke hocked a big stream of spit in Gold Medalist Inge De Bruign's lane. It does your heart good to see our country represented with such class. "I could swim that fast too, if I was a man," she said, always the gracious loser. To an extent I can understand her beef. It does seem a bit suspect that a woman could all of the sudden swim across the pool 3 seconds faster than she could a few months ago. True, she has a freakish jutting chin that makes Jay Leno look like Tom Green, and the protruding forehead of a monster. But she passed the drug test right? Maybe like so many other Olympic athletes she got to take the multiple choice version of the drug test. "Which of the following is most true: 1) I have never taken illegal performance enhancing drugs, 2) I tried them once years ago, but I didn't inhale. 3) Help me, I've been turned into a superhuman steroid mutant. I could climb up the wall like a spider. Doc said it was okay."

Luckily for De Bruign, sunken deep beneath all those prominent facial bones rests a penetrating pair of lovely blue eyes. I think she looks enough like a girl--in fact in an alien kind of way she's pretty hot. Talk about hotties how about that gorgeous specimen, Marion Jones--Gold Medalist sprinter, "the world's fastest woman." It certainly was disheartening to see her Gold so quickly tarnished by the scandal that spoiled the trip for her husband, fellow Olympian CJ Hunter. The big fella had reportedly withdrawn form the Shot Put competition due to a knee injury--but sadly it has since been revealed that he'd actually been disqualified from the games after testing positive for eleven herbs and spices.

As has historically been the case, this Olympiad has seen it's share of drug-related controversy. The IOC has gotten so carried away with it's medal-stripping and disqualifications that the Olympic athletes wouldn't dare drink a diet Coke. They disqualified a compact little weight lifter because tests detected traces of an illegal diuretic. This is a man that can lift 8 times his bodyweight over his head, and they destroyed his dreams because he took a water pill to lose the 2 ounces necessary to qualify for his customary weight class. It all seems so tragic, but the truth is the diminutive dynamo was relieved the test didn't reveal that, just prior to the Games, he'd undergone a genetic fusion with a Worker Ant. Luckily for him his urine revealed no trace of Ant--it could've been worse.