I spent about 18 years as a professional martial artist, as I have mentioned before. Bruce Lee’s movies were a great inspiration – and I wasn’t surprised to find out that he was also a dance champion (jive, latin) when he was a college student. The elegance and speed of his martial arts work are breathtaking and you don’t need to be a fighter to dig such excellence. He was to the martial arts what Mohammed Ali was to boxing – someone who elevated gorgeous movement in their fighting art, setting dizzying standards. “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” was an Ali signature that easily applied to Lee.
After he died, the world of kung-fu movies never really recovered, although new franchises were developed (not the least that of the comic Jackie Chan). But many young people have tried to imitate Bruce Lee, just as wannabe singers have developed their chops by mimicking Michael Jackson’s Thriller performance.
Now Nokia has dressed an expert of the nunchucka (two sticks linked by a chain as in the first photo) in Bruce Lee’s most famous jumpsuit and used fuzzy black-and-white camera work to produce a supposedly vintage piece of film in which this “Bruce Lee” beats two ping-pong experts. Why?
Turns out that Nokia has released a limited edition phone with various bits and pieces of Bruce Lee added – his face and signature on the case, a Bruce Lee doll, a nunchuck key holder and some preloaded images of the great actor. Technically it’s no different from the version that costs about $600, but Nokia seems confident that this ad will convince you that the $1300 tag is justified. From the day in the 60s I first saw hippy beaded headbands being sold in a department store, I have hated commercial co-optation. Here’s the ad, to be followed by a treat:
Fans of Bruce Lee have done some great tribute clips. If you want to see the real Bruce Lee working with his nunchuckas, check out this 6:40 minute excerpt from one of his early movies that has been put to the music of Sergei Prokofiev's “Romeo and Juliet”. The backstory is that Bruce Lee’s character is fearlessly confronting an entire martial arts school in order to right a wrong. The nunchucks start at 2:40, but if you skip forward you’ll miss some of his incomparable focused concentration, his majestic choreography and the moment (gasp) when he strips off his top. Isn’t he something?!
Killer Kowalski has died. A Canadian born in 1926, the giant of a man (6’7”) got into wrestling, they say, to help work his way through college.
I remember Kowalski from my childhood in Pittsburgh, especially because of his rivalry with Bruno Sammartino, our big-time local wrestling champ. Sammartino was born in Italy (1936), but his professional life was centered in Pittsburgh’s “Studio Wrestling” show on Channel 11. Here’s a great site tracing the 60s history of this program.
My parents forced me to watch a lot of sports. In my mother’s house “our” identity as Pirates and Steelers fans was as important as our identity as Jews. Other than my adoration for Roberto Clemente, whose photo I still display in my home, and my fondness for sitting in the bleachers at Forbes Field with my dad, eating hotdogs, I wasn’t all that interested.
However, I didn’t mind when we ate dinner Saturday nights around the card table in the living room in order to watch “Studio Wrestling.” I seem to remember – but perhaps I made it up – that my dad was tight with Izzy Moidel, the main referee. Izzy added to the theatre of the events by looking the other way during illegal moves, like one wrestler breaking a chair over another’s head.
Each wrestler had his “schtick.” Usually this was based on a professional, ethnic or racial stereotype. Sammartino was an Italian hero. The Sheik, from Syria, always entered the ring with an interpreter and harem. There was Chief White Owl, Cowboy Bill Watts and the popular Haystack Calhoun (see photo). At 640 pounds, he played up his image as the gentle hillbilly by wearing overalls and a horseshoe around his neck while pretending to be from Arkansas (instead of Texas). Most of the wrestlers were loud-mouths and no one cared that it wasn’t “real” the way boxing was real – all of Pittsburgh took vociferous sides and 10,000 to 15,000 of us turned up in the Civic Center to cheer our favorites.
My grandmother, an immigrant who never learned to read or write any language until she was widowed and studied English, was a sweet, hardworking nearly-deaf woman. Put her in front of “Studio Wrestling” and she was transformed into a wild woman. I’m not sure if all of this was a lesson in sports or a lesson in theatre, but I’m sorry to hear of Killer Kowalski’s passing.
PRICK OF THE WEEK The women’s pole vaulting is an interesting world with the personable, media flirt Yelena Isinbayeva at its pinnacle. Living up to expectations, she took the gold and broke her own world record in the process. The American Jenn Stuczynski, a former college basketball player who only took up pole vaulting four years ago, scored the silver medal, a quite remarkable feat.
Her coach, an odious piece of work named Rick Suhr, wins the Prick of the Week award (above) for his behavior following her moment of pride. Speaking into a loud mic for all the world, quite literally, to hear, he lambasted her for not taking the gold!
I found the full text of his foul remarks on this website, but I’ll only burden you with a few choice sentences, spoken as he looked at his Blackberry or turned away from her, I’m sparing you the annoyance of a video clip of his mean-spirited, rejecting body language.
It’s the same old same old, you’re losing takeoff at the big heights. (shrug) Whaddaya gonna do? (shrug, looks away) …You weren’t on, your warmup didn’t go well…Whaddaya gonna do? (shrugs, looks away) Didn’t have the legs. Her legs are fresh. Hey, it’s a silver medal. Not bad for someone that’s been pole vaulting for four years. (looks down at his blackberry)
Stuczynski walked away with a dejected look of defeat – a silver medal for gawds sake. It was like witnessing a woman being abused by a bully. I take that back, it wasn’t “like” witnessing – it was the real thing. I assume the pole vaulting officials, whoever they might be, intend to kick his butt for his treatment of her and I hope that Stuczynski finds herself a new coach, this time of a human persuasion.
TRAMPOLINE / DIVING After waiting impatiently for the women’s trampoline finals, I was given a paltry four routines, late at night, that didn’t even include the performance of the bronze medalist! This was followed by all eight male gymnastics finalists on the still rings. They were quite superhuman, but I wish I could have seen all the tramp-ers.
During a subsequent daytime broadcast I was able to see the eight male trampoline finalists. And I’ve watched all the diving – both synchronized and individual –I could find. I’m not reporting on the results of these competitions because I generally find results irrelevant – I just love this opportunity to see these world-class graceful athletes. And did I say courageous?
SOFTBALL I’ve got a special place in my heart for softball, always the tomboy’s refuge. Although it’s played in 140 countries, the Americas utterly dominate the sport and this Olympics is no different. Apparently both baseball and softball are going to be dropped as Olympic sports after Beijing. Sports are always coming and going – to make room for newly qualified events like Trampoline, Tae Kwon Do (with entrants from many small countries as it requires very little equipment) and BMX, Bicycle Motocross Racing. Instead of trying to explain this treacherous, wild sport in words, here’s a 57 second video clip that gives you a sense of BMX. (If you're chicken-shit, just skip it and continue reading.)
TRIATHLON Triathlon is the perfect television sport to unpack my moving boxes to. It goes on and on and is likely to be exciting whenever you dip your viewing focus into the procedures. I enjoyed both the women’s and the men’s events. These long sports are such a handsome show of endurance that one nearly forgets how crucial strategy is to their success.
WEIGHT-LIFTING Matthias Steiner, who lost his wife in a car accident last year, took the gold for Germany in the 105+kg (231 pounds) division of the weight-lifting competition with an astounding 258 kg (568 pound) clean and jerk lift. Sports like weight-lifting are a relief after the convoluted if not arbitrary judging of the gymnastics. You either lift the weight and hold it for 2 seconds or you don’t. Steiner showed that pure feeling of triumph and joy that one doesn’t get to see among the poised, posed gymnasts and divers, as he held up his wife’s photo during the medal ceremony.
GYMNASTICS JUDGING The finals on individual apparatus are going on, a few events at a time late in the evenings. This great sport has been more or less ruined by the International Federation of Gymnastics (IFG) by the obtuse, arcane judging systems devised in reaction to previous lousy judging displays.
The system used to be transparent enough to give fans (and competitors) a sense that they knew what the hell was going on. Since Atlanta in 1996, they no longer allow for ties despite the fact that other Olympic sports allow them. They have different systems of breaking ties for different gymnastics events that work on the basis of “these are the rules and you know that before you competed, so there!” Worst of all, they’ve binned the characteristic “perfect 10.”
Bela Karolyi, long-time gymnastics coach (Nadia Comaneci and Mary Lou Retton), now retired, has been adding some welcome passion and excitement to augment Bob Costas’ tired commentary. Costas obviously isn’t nuts about Bela – he mentions in a denigrating tone that Bela “has opinions” – but it’s hard to argue with anything Karolyi has been saying.
The Americans can’t stop bringing up their suspicions that some of the Chinese gymnasts are under the required age minimum of 16. (Karolyi wonders why they have a minimum age anyway.) Passports were produced as proof and there’s nothing much anyone can do about it. But is youth always such an advantage? Oksana Chusovitina who I mentioned in a previous post, won the silver medal in the vault at 33 in her fifth Olympic games, representing her third national team. Plus she has a short haircut. Irresistible.
ARE YOU TIRED OF MY COMPLAINTS ABOUT NBC?
Apparently NBC Thinks the Chinese Are All Orphans The end of just about every swim or vault or other performance by an American is followed by a camera cut to the parents in the stands, with their names in a text banner. Don’t the Chinese have parents? Why don’t we see them? We’re still hearing but not seeing the incredibly enthusiastic reaction of the Chinese to the amazing job their athletes are doing. I want to see the celebration. This is a global event. I want to see everyone’s joy, no matter how camera-unworthy NBC considers the event or the nationality.
And quit with the close-ups. There’s a whole giant stadium – let’s see the context, let’s see the event, not never-ending shots of American freckles.
Get Out of my Face If we’re talking about MSNBC, let me raise another complaint – one echoed many times on its own message board. Their daily 5:00 “Olympic Update” is excruciatingly below par. I have a feeling they’re trying to target “young people,” – which is simply an insult to young people. While it is anchored by the enthusiastic and competent Tamryn Hall in NY, she turns to a couple of clowns in the Beijing studio, Tiki Barber and Jenna Wolf. Tiki can barely get a word in edgewise and he isn’t much of a presence. Wolf, however, is exceptionally supercilious, uninformed and insufferable. She brags about knowing nothing about sport and finds many events ridiculous. Her riffs are all about herself, when she isn’t insulting athletes out of her stupidity. Her refusal to understand the nuances of their events is arrogant. She so needs to go elsewhere. I watch Olympic broadcasts night and day, practically, but I don’t want this fool in my nice new living room.
Mary Carillo The thing I like about Mary Carillo – who is doubling-up, doing late-night anchoring as well as features on Chinese life – is that she is obviously delighted by this chance to dig into the lives of Chinese people. I’ve always liked her deep voice and short brunette hair – not something you see much of on TV, well not among women – but this time I’m blown away by her respect for China.
Brian Williams Williams has been doing the national news from Beijing. I actually like Williams – like many people I admired his persistence in covering New Orleans long after Katrina. He knows how to pronounce “Bey-Jing” in contrast to Costas and others in his crew who affect a made-up “Bey-Zhing.”
TO SUM UP I’m a very committed Olympics-watcher. I adore seeing the performers and performances from around the world. I’m not particularly interested in the medals, in who wins, in the national numbers. I’m devastated that, just as I anticipated, we are seeing only one sliver of the Olympic experience. We haven’t had a peek at the Village (at left), which apparently the competitors find luxurious. We haven’t heard from the Chinese fans or those from other countries. We’re not getting stories about athletes who have sacrificed everything to virtually train themselves in impossible conditions. Where are the tiny countries? The poor countries? The competitors who have never before been abroad?
The numbers game? It’s about business, profit, nationalism, competition, endorsements, xenophobia, elitism – a lot of crap. Training in a sport with your whole heart and body and brain is an experience I would wish on everyone. The element of competition is always dangerous and distorting – and the more intense and elite, the more destructive to the body. Winning is exhilarating, of course, but those day-to-day endorphins one gets from training bring a profound health. I hope the Olympics are inspiring people of all ages in all places to get down and dirty with their bodies. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to call the senior center and request that they set up a trampoline course.
Sports(wo)menship Why are the male beach volleyball partnerships so fraught with ugliness? One team of brothers, we are told, didn’t speak to each other on or off the sand. We’re shown a clip of one brother ignoring an offered hand-shake from the other. This week I saw a match between the Swiss and Americans and they were the most miserable bad-tempered bunch. What’s the point?
In contrast, there’s Dara Torres. She was about to do her preliminary swim in the 50m when she unexpectedly walked down the length of the pool and began talking to the head judge, before dipping down to splash a few handfuls of pool water on her arms. The TV commentators could not understand what was going down. Is there a problem with her splashing herself? they wondered. Torres walked back to her station and spoke to the other racers. The commentators were astounded. Usually Torres is in her pre-race zone. Such an interruption is unheard of. It turns out that the swimsuit of the racer next to her had ripped. Torres, in her generosity and maturity, told her to run and change while she, Torres, made it right with the judges. She also told all the women – Let’s just wait until the Swedish swimmer gets back. Such solidarity and respect – it’s a whole different level of sportswomanship.
100 meter The quarterfinals of the men’s 100 meter dash were well-presented with good explanations and interesting narratives. From Dix’s areo-dynamic sleeves to the studious eyeglasses of Hu Kai to Powell’s startling speed. In the end, Usian Bolt’s (age 21) win was particularly interesting because once he clinched the gold – about 20 meters from the end – he stopped concentrating and started celebrating, waving his arms around (and soon his gold spike shoes too). When asked why he didn’t try to finish the race for an even faster record break (the record is his, anyway), he said it was all about the gold.
Badminton I’m not a regular, but watching the gold medal victory of China’s Lin Dan was a trip. The Chinese fans have the same level of passion as the most compulsive of the world’s soccer or basketball or baseball fans. He was nearly overwhelmed by emotion as he clinched it, and the fans went nuts. Luckily, for a change, we were able to actually see the audience reaction. Dan saluted his fans in all directions, threw his racket up to applauding supporters and then took off his shoes and threw those up into the stands, too, before running into the ecstatic crowd for a group hug. Cool.
Strip Tease My friend D believes (only slightly tongue-in-cheek) that NBC is making its broadcast decisions based on the least clothes worn (by women). Whether it’s swimming or the endless, endless beach volleyball, it’s all about the stripped down look. Considering that the beach volleyball men wear t-shirts and long roomy shorts, I must ask once again why the women are competing in their underwear. Sports like judo, white water racing, archery, equestrian and fencing – in which women are in full garb – not so much.
Phelps continued Once Michael Phelps won his seventh gold medal, NBC brought on Mark Spitz – who apparently hadn’t even been invited to the Olympics for some arcane reason and who was being presented by some of the media as petulant about that –for a split-screen joint interview with Michael Phelps. Spitz has held the 7-gold record for 36 years (since Munich) and was wonderfully gracious in praising Phelps. But Phelps, on the other hand, refused to return the favor. He would not single out Spitz, despite the fact that a lot of the attention Phelps is getting is because of matching (and now breaking) Spitz’s gold medal record. The interviewer would say, So how do you react to such enthusiastic compliments from history’s swimming legend? And Phelps would respond with something bland like, I honor all the many greats who came before me. He simply would not play nice. I don’t know if there’s a back story, but for me it seemed sour and parsimonious on Phelps’ part.
With all the talk about quantity, how quickly we forget. Why haven’t we heard about the Russian gymnast Larissa Latynina. In her first Olympics in 1956, according to Wikipedia, she won four golds (including the all-around), one silver and one bronze. She went on to achieve a lifetime of 18 Olympic medals. Her last competitive Olympics was 1964. Amazingly, she medaled in every Olympic event she ever entered, except for coming in 4th in the 1956 balance beam. I’d say she was worthy of mention, wouldn’t you?
At the 1958 World Championships, Larissa Latynina won 5 gold (out of 6) and one silver while pregnant. Click here to see some silent black&white film of her achievement.
Women’s Marathon I had friends over to watch the marathon and the swimming finals. Constantina Tomescu (Romania) took an early lead and just kept going and going without a falter. Tomescu at 38 is the oldest marathon winner in Olympic history. The last oldest woman was 30. What’s going on? Older women athletes have been performing brilliantly in Beijing.
The marathon is one crazy-assed sport, an intense combination of strategy and endurance. It’s a gas to watch (especially the last miles), but has never appealed to me as a participant. It’s like swimming –training is a solitary, non-verbal endeavor. With swimming, not only can’t you speak – you can’t hear, see or smell. I personally like my sports loud, interactive and social.
Perhaps one of the most stunning moments of camerawork was a close-up of the thighs of several of the women runners, revealing the intricate choreography of the muscles and tendons, contracting and relaxing, as they ran. We were so mesmerized and amazed that we didn’t even finish the chocolate on the table.
I told my friends this marathon story. I had a martial arts colleague L who practiced a rooted, heavy Japanese style. L was a stocky, thick muscular guy until he decided to switch to marathon running. The change in his body shape, once he lost all his subcutaneous fat, was mind-blowing. As much as he practiced and as good as he became, he could never compete. Why? No matter how he varied his eating habits, he always had to take a crap in the middle of his run. That was ok on his farm, but really wouldn’t have worked well on the streets of Beijing.
Water Polo I can see that this is a very demanding sport. The swimmers can’t touch the bottom or sides of the pool and they end up swimming something like five kilometers in a game. But I’ll be damned if I can follow the games, what with bobbing heads sheathed in those anonymous rubber caps, with unidentifiable arms shooting into the air to try for the net and all that splashing. I apologize for my ignorance.
Women’s Tennis Doubles I just love those Williams sisters, whose entrance to professional tennis rescued women’s tennis from the doldrums – despite unforgivable resistance from tennis institutions, players and media - after it lost Martina. While neither woman took a medal in the individuals (Russians won all three!), they were so joyful over the doubles gold that you would never know what long-time champions they’ve been. Their magic is how they keep it fresh.
Trampoline At last we got to see a meager slice of an early round of the women’s and men’s trampoline. (Only the individual events are included in the Olympics, unfortunately.) I find it so very exhilarating. The judging criteria are easy to understand: go very high throughout (“big air”), perform ten series of features (double salto reverse spread, the rudolph, etc), and stay within the center box of the apparatus. It’s like doing those wonderful high dive combinations, but ten times without pause. If only they had an over-60 division, I’d sign up.
Why isn’t this sport, which is such a vastly visual thrill, getting more play? Oh, right, the Americans aren’t among the front-runners. I couldn’t yet find any video clips from the Beijing Olympic trampoline, but here’s one from the women’s finals at the 2007 World Championship, in case you want to see the sport that makes me go all gushy.
Before getting into my rant about the coverage of swimming and gymnastics, here are my observations of a few other events.
Baseball: USA loses its first round match against Korea. Supposedly the quintessential American sport, baseball has taken on a seriously international flavor – whether you’re looking at the countries of origin of professional baseball players in the States, or how the USA does in world competitions. Is its imperialism coming back to bite the US in the balls?
Softball: In softball, on the other hand, the USA women are kicking ridiculous butt. First Jenny Finch and then Cat Osterman pitched Olympic no-hitters. Has anyone seen these matches on TV? I sure the hell haven’t. The baseball rout of the men, though, was shown from start to finish.
Judo: Congratulations to Ronda Rousey of Santa Monica, California, who became the first U.S. woman to win a judo medal with a bronze in the 70-kilogram competition. Only by accident did I discover that she tied for bronze with Edith Bosch of the Netherlands. That hasn’t been mentioned. Can anyone name the gold (Masae Ueno of Japan) and silver (Anaysi Hernandez of Cuba) winners? Oops, they’re not Americans so NBC seems to have neglected to show us their matches or even their faces. I couldn’t find any photos of the gold/silver winners, so here’s one of Ronda.
Single Kayak: Anyone who can’t watch all day on the secondary broadcast networks is missing the excitement of such events as the women’s single kayak through plunging, roiling white water. Slovakia’s Elena Kaliska is the defending champion and she’s facing former gold-medalist Stepanka Hilgertova (age 40) of the Czech Republic, who apparently trains with her 20-year-old son.
Beach Volleyball (women’s): The relief! Thank gawd the Americans have finally taken the damned gold and will no longer be clogging up prime time. I’ve learned more than I wanted to know about the men in their lives, their wedding gowns and rings and their invincibility (although they have certainly been unbeatable). The endless bikini body-part shots have put me off sand (photo) forever. Why has this relatively new and minor sport been given such endless primetime coverage? Is this a sport or an excuse for these cameramen (sic) and producers to be naughty?
Swimming: The coverage of the swimming is insufferable. As my media-savvy friend said, Haven’t they heard about computer graphics? Here’s some of the stuff that bothers me the most:
They use no graphic (Why not an arrow? a dot?) to point to the swimmer they’re talking about during the races. Last night they showed endless preliminary rounds of endless different swimming events (at least the men’s) including repetitive warm-ups and goggle adjustments – at the expense of coverage of the men’s gymnastic all-around competition! They rarely discuss the quality of the strokes or explain the difference in the skills needed for different events, but they show us lap turns over and over until we are dizzy and dazed. They fetishize the talented Michael Phelps who, while doing amazing things in the pool, is in a position to get so many medals because there are so many different swimming events. The most the Venus sisters, for example, could possibly get is two medals: singles and doubles. NBC is hyping him - at age 23, in the middle of an Olympics – as the greatest athlete in the history of sport!?! Didn’t they ever hear of Jesse Owens? Martina Navratilova? Pele? Or The Greatest, Muhammed Ali? NBC’s irritating habit of putting up their “Live” logo, even when they are showing clips from four years ago, is particularly prominent during their exhausting swimming coverage.
And strangest of all: Where are the crowds? We can hear them cheering, we can see them as little dots of color from a distance, but NBC does not pan the crowd - not unless they're focusing on Bush, Phelp's mother or a famous coach. I want to watch the celebrations, I'd love to see what the general Chinese crowd wears to the Olympics and I want to feel part of the global Olympics fan base. This erasure of the audience is downright rude.
Michael Phelps: Allow me a sub-category for the man who is totally dominating the men’s swimming competitions, sometimes winning two gold medals within an hour or so. As energized as he seems to be by the team events, one wonders how he keeps going, event after event, gold after gold, pressure after pressure. I suspect that he lives like a fish – only swimming, eating, sleeping – and not just during the Olympics. In one race, his goggles filled up on one side as soon as he dove in, so despite breaking the world record (yet again) and winning the gold medal (yet again), he felt frustrated because he could have gone faster. Phelps is racing against himself at this point.
Gymnastics: What’s up with NBC’s constant close-up coverage of one of the broadest stages in the world? I stayed up Wednesday night until, well, Thursday morning to follow the should-have-been-riveting men’s all-around individual gymnastics competition, but it was NBC that blew my mind. It is a good thing that I am not homicidal towards TV screens or we’d have a glass problem on the carpet.
I would greatly prefer not to have to talk about NBC and their impossibly irrelevant coverage – I want to talk about the Olympics, the athletes and their events. NBC however is making that almost impossible. Why not just turn off the sound to avoid their off-topic chatter, you ask, and just watch the sport? Because they do not show us the sport. Let me explain.
Picture the venue (at left) in which Gymnastics takes place. It is a huge stadium, with areas for each apparatus. There are groups who rotate among these stations, and in these groups are the two most highly-rated gymnasts of each participating country. If you are watching gymnastic competitions, you will be astounded to hear that there are a total of 267 competitors. You would be astounded because you never get a peek at most of them. Not Mohamed Srour (Egypt), not Ana Rente (Portugal), not Thi Ngan Thuong Do (Vietnam) nor Wania Monteiro (Cape Verde).
Last night NBC decided, incorrectly, from the start that the all-around was a contest between the USA’s Jonathan Horton, who finished 9th, and the eventual winner, China’s Yang Wei. In the middle of their coverage, NBC suddenly admitted getting caught “off-guard” and – too late for the viewers – began covering France’s Benoit Caranobe (Bronze) and increased coverage of Silver medalist Kohei Uchimura from Japan.
And what did their coverage involve? We follow their favorites as they wrap and unwrap their wrists, as they chalk up their palms or as they sit, with very little facial affect, waiting endlessly for their slow-coming results. And we watch this over and over and over. The camera stays close on faces that barely change or that momentarily break, smiling into the camera nearly stuck up their schnoz, while all around them other, hidden from hungry viewers, gymnasts from everywhere are having their chance to compete on the global stage.
We want to see the competitors from the smaller countries. We want to know the spectrum of achievement that qualifies a gymnast to compete. We want to see the behavior of those athletes who don’t come out of the massive sports machines of the richest countries on earth. We want a wide view of the multiple disciplines happening simultaneously. We want NBC to use the time to generously include the world.
And when NBC’s favorites (and in this case they picked poorly except for the obviously unstoppable Yang Wei) perform, do they name and explain the moves, do they tell us what is involved in holding the body parallel to the floor on the rings or comment on how they learn to do those twisting, spinning dismounts? No. These criminally negligent commentators chat. They do not comment on the routine or outline the rules or criteria. They talk about other competitors or what they saw at the market. They don’t teach and they don’t illuminate. They blather.
Of course, because of past problems with “subjective” judging, they have changed gymnastics judging systems – for the worse. Now it is all about deductions – not about achievements. Competitors start with a maximum score and each imperfection takes away a prescribed fraction of a point. The judges – and NBC’s commentators – aren’t watching for creativity, innovation or elegance: they are only watching for errors. It’s not about the fearless acrobatics in the air or the extraordinary degree of strength; it’s about a hop on the dismount. What a terrible blow to gymnastics this new judging system is.
Trampoline: Of all my frustrations, the gravest is my failure to find out if and when this glorious event is going be covered. The person who can point me towards coverage – TV or online – wins a public declaration of my gratitude on my blog – one that is as under-rated and unrecognized as the very entertaining Synchronized Swimming, slated for broadcast on the 18th at 3:00 am.
I’m not the only one enjoying the fact that there are so many older people competing in the Olympics this time. In fact, I’ve had continuous big-time interest in my blog of a couple of weeks ago about Dara Torres, the 41 year-old swimmer. I’m not sure the buzz is only about her age: there’s also the fact that she has an infant and, more likely, the appeal of her rather astounding body.
But when I started digging, I found all sorts of Olympic athletes of a certain age. Here are some thumbnail portraits of eight participants who have confounded the age assumptions about sport.
Luan Jujie, 50: Luan won her gold medal in fencing in 1984 as part of the first Chinese delegation to the summer Olympics. In 1989 she emigrated to Canada and this year, because it is in her homeland, she is in Beijing representing Canada. She continues to be a heroic figure in China, where she is called “Asia’s First Foil.” She is excited about being back in China and not just because they made a movie about her and put out a 2006 stamp with her face. Age isn’t an issue, she says. “Some people think I'm too old but that just means I have nothing to lose… China has developed so fast, I wanted to come back and say how thankful I was for everything." Unfortunately, Luan was eliminated in her second round match.
Susan Nattrass, 57: Nattrass was, in 1976, the first female shooter in Olympic history. This week, at her sixth Olympics, she was eliminated during the final qualifying round for trap shooting. She remains quite a big deal in the Canadian sports world. In Beijing she explained her elimination: “I probably started trying too hard,'' she said. “It's hard when it's probably my last Olympics.”
And then there are all the older horse riders: What happens when you have an event in which women and men of all ages compete together? You get women and men of all ages, including Boomers and beyond. Here are some outstanding examples.
Hiroshi Hoketsu, 67: The oldest competitor in Beijing is Japan's Hiroshi Hoketsu. He still weighs the same 62 kilos (137 pounds) as in his first Olympic games in Tokyo, 1964. He told one journalist, “I don’t feel comfortable being fussed about just because of my age.”
Ian Millar, 61, is a Canadian Show jumper riding in his ninth Olympics – it would’ve been tenth except for the boycott of Moscow. His first was Munich in 1972. Known at home as Captain Canada, he is considered the world's most successful show jumper. He attributes his success to his ability to adapt to changes in his sport. "It applies to so many endeavours in life to include our sport of show jumping. You better be willing to evolve."
Mark Todd, 52, returns for his sixth Olympics after being named Rider of the 20th Century by the International Equestrian Federation. He already has four Olympic medals for New Zealand, but apparently can’t handle his booze. "In October, we had some friends staying and over a few too many glasses of wine I said something like `find me a horse for the next Olympics'," Todd told one newspaper. They did and he did.
Laurie Lever, 60: An Olympic virgin at 60, Laurie Lever has been riding for 50 years. The father of four children, he has never had an Olympic qualifying horse before now. When asked about the impact of age on his performance, Lever said, “I would like to be 40 and have the knowledge I do now.”
Two Women “only” 33 Okay, so these two women aren’t Boomers. But at 33, they’re seriously older than the vast majority of the competitors in their events.
Melanie Roach: This determined athlete missed the 2000 Sydney Games because of back problems, a not uncommon problem (along with knees and elbows and ankles, etc) among weightlifters, who traditionally have pretty short careers. She used the time to start a family and despite having three kids under six, she underwent successful surgery for her herniated disc and qualified for the US team by lifting 240 lbs, more than twice her weight. Although she didn’t win a medal on Sunday, she was the only woman competitor to lift in all six of her attempts and she broke the American record. Not too shabby.
The "Girlish" Event Women gymnasts are so young that there needs to be a strictly observed lower age limit at 16. The intensity of young girls’ gymnastic training arrests their puberty - and even in their late teens, gymnasts often look girlish. This year there has been a ton of controversy over suspicions, but apparently no proof, that the tiny Chinese gymnasts are under the requisite 16.
Oksana Chusovitina: And then there is Oksana Chusovitina, 33, now a member of the German team and the oldest gymnast in the 2008 Olympics. She’s already qualified in an amazing fourth place for the vault final. This is her fifth Olympics and, unusually, her third national team. She won team gold as part of the United team shortly after the end of the USSR. Then she was Uzbekistan’s first world champion and a part of their Olympic team, until she switched to the German team in 2006. She had turned to the German gymnastics coach, an old friend, for help in getting her son good medical attention when he was diagnosed with leukemia. He is now in remission.
How does she feel about being twice as old as most of her competitors? She feels like so many older people with a passion. "I feel perfect and I feel young, I will retire when it's time to go," she said. "It's my secret. I live gymnastics and it's my life."
I am an Olympics addict. I sink into the Olympics, happy to see the best of the best in sports that otherwise have little presence in my life, even though I rarely watch broadcast sports in between one Olympics and the next. My favorite summer sports are Tae Kwon Do (I was a TKD professional for 18 years) and Trampoline (It’s the one I’d most like to learn.)
Or rather, I would be in couch-potato heaven if the USA coverage weren’t so crappy. NBC is doing a predictably poor job. I always prefer to watch the Olympics in a different country – I’ve seen it in England and in Israel. In both places I was able to access European sports channels; the show is especially fabulous when the coverage isn’t concentrated around the nationalistic medal ambitions of a single country.
NBC’s coverage is focused on those events where the USA has contenders for medals. We may see a bit of the work of our closest rivals, but we don’t get to see the performance of all the wonderful teams from poor countries. What I like are the world’s athletes, their struggles to achieve Olympic-level work and the impact on them of going through this dream-come-true experience in global company. I’m not all that aroused by broken records or medal totals. I go for the quality, not quantity.
For these first couple of days I watched with a friend who is a media expert and he helped me figure out an initial list of problems with NBC’s coverage:
Who are these “guys”? The announcers – overwhelmingly white men – are rarely introduced; their qualifications aren’t explained. Some blather more about rankings than the performance we’re watching.
Peek-a-boo scheduling: It’s difficult to find an itemized schedule of televised events. The one on NBC’s website only offers generalized blocks of time with lists of events.
Poor marketing: NBC doesn’t cross-promote their other networks, so to find out what’s on the other channels, you have to continuously click around. And NBC coercively limits primetime broadcasting to their main station, with its cascade of commercials, instead of letting us choose from a cornucopia of interesting less-known sports, as we can in the daytime.
Poor production values: Their informational graphics suck. Take the 400-meter individual medley race in which Michael Phelps won his first gold medal (in record-breaking time). At the end of each lap, they only label the leader, instead of all the swimmers in turn, so you can’t easily follow any individual swimmer. They provide no context, no standard, no sense of previous records, expected times – they don’t teach us the sport. Plus, they neglected to use a noise-control mic so we couldn’t hear the commentary over the cheering. It’s not even on par with routine network coverage of baseball and American football. And during the gymnastics, how could we tell what the atmosphere was like when they gave us no wide-shots to show the varied stations, the rotations and the multiple simultaneous competitor try-outs in the stadium?
Rules? What rules? For the Gymnastics qualifying rounds, NBC gave us no sense of the scoring benchmarks. One unnamed commentator noted that there would be a deduction for a step taken on a landing, implying that the athletes start with a certain number from which there are reductions. But what score? Where are the judges sitting? How does the judging process work? What’s the point of showing us all these competitions without conveying a sense of how to win.
Exceptions to prove the rule: The exceptions were terrific. One woman commentator on the rowing events explained all the rules, the length of the race and the expected completion time. I know nothing about these rowing sports, but at least I could be an informed observer thanks to this information. Just a shame I can’t tell you her name or sport pedigree.
The good news?
Opening night and infrastructure: The opening ceremony was a remarkable confection of history, symbolism, technology, complexity, 15,000 star performers and over-the-top color, in every sense. The facilities are hi-tech, unique, gorgeous – from the much-discussed international collaborative Bird’s Nest coliseum to the bubble-wrapped Water Cube. Competitors universally gush over their accommodations, the food, the transportation, the practice venues: China.
Couture: I watched the March of Nations with close friends who joined me in judging the outfits. Ooo! Yech! Too many countries (but not the US) forced their tough-assed women athletes to wear skirts – and dowdy ones at that. The Chinese cheerleaders who leapt and danced in a perimeter throughout the long march (pun intended) had to wear high heels.
Xie Xingfing, badminton: Other than the beach volleyball, there are few events that don’t fascinate me, especially if I learn a little something about the personalities. Xie Xingfing, 27, is the long-time Chinese badminton champion. She and her boyfriend, her male counterpart in the game, are known as the Chinese “Posh and Becks” of badminton.
Jeannie Longo, cyclist: I watched the 126.4 kilometer (78.5 mile) cycling road race, conducted in the rain on slippery roads and including climbing hills to the Great Wall. Jeannie Longo (photo on left) is a French cyclist who will be 50 in just two months. She finished in 24th place, 33 seconds behind the winners and ahead of the three American cyclists. It was her 7th Olympics!
Dara Torres, swimmer: I wrote about Dara earlier. She became, at 41, the oldest swimming medalist, period, when she anchored the American women’s 400-meter relay team, gaining the silver.
Synchronized Springboard: I was dazzled by the women’s Synchronized Springboard diving, performed on the 3 meter board. For the second Olympiad in a row, it was won by China’s Guo Jingjing and Wu Minxia. There is a magic to synchronization in such complex, lightning fast, twisting and spinning dives – and the perfect echo of what we saw in the opening ceremony: routine after routine in each of which 2008 performers drummed or danced or tumbled in breath-taking unison, without – seemingly – any loss of individual focus and fulfillment.
My journey to China … Not: I wish I could wrap up by telling you about my trip to China, but it hasn’t happened yet. In the 1960s, I was a great admirer of the Chinese Revolution, its achievements around women, education and health. I loved the writings of Chairman Mao, and related strongly to his views about class. I saved my paucity of pennies for an eventual trip, but history took over. I learned about re-education camps for queers, about the injustices of the Cultural Revolution and other repulsive misdeeds as the single party consolidated its power. I used the money to buy a car when I moved abroad. Now China is catching up with me. Everyone wants to trade in their bike for an auto. It turns out that Buick, considered a status symbol there, is nowadays selling more cars in China than in the States.
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