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I haven’t really been watching the Olympics. Has anyone? I mean, I know that millions and millions of people around the world have been watching the Olympics, but they don’t count. I turned the Olympics on the other day and saw a dude cross-country ski-ing, and in the bottom right corner the timer was ticking off minute 14 (minute 14!) and I said “goodnight, Olympics” and turned that off, because I am an adult, and my time deserves respect. And another time that I turned on the Olympics I had just missed Johnny Weir’s figure skating performance, but the announcers were going nuts for him, saying that after all of his tough-talk he finally backed it up with some impressive skating, and I thought, “fair enough,” and then I watched the judges scores, and he only placed fifth? Once more, I turned off the Olympics, because I am an adult, and I do not need to be lied to by over-excitable broadcasters. I saw Shaun White’s gold medal run on-line. It was pretty neat. He went so high into the air! Although, I tried to imagine the legend of Shaun White, like, 40 years from now, when some 15-year-old athlete who has mastered the hover-spaceboard speaks reverently about Olympic hero Shaun White who was the “best who ever lived,” and I compared that with the long-haired stoner that is Shaun White, and I felt a pang of Old Man-ness at how noble Olympic Heroes are not what they once were (this thought is sponsored by Werther’s Originals). Not to mention the fact that snowboarding is a make believe sport and there was no such thing as a half-pipe in the times of the Gods. But whatever. This is your 2010 Olympics thread. Go for the gold.
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The Winter Olympics are happening?
yep.
Hey! It?s Friday!
wanna chat? http://videogum.com/chat/
ARE YOU fucking serious, GABE? THERE ARE plenty of ADULTS JUST as mature AS ME, WATCHING THE shit out of THE OLYMPICS! How do you NOT ENJOY SHIT like Lindsay VONN! THAT’S FUCKIN Disney material PEOPLE.
BESIDES this is AMERICA. WE HAVE to beat the HELL OUT of every OTHER COUNTRY TO SHOW, recession OR NO recession WE STILL GOT YOU BY THE glittery (OR KHAKI FOR SOME SKATERS) balls!
Fact: Shaun White and I are hair-twins. Fact: we both blink and have souls!!!!!
OMG, are you the last missing Carrot Top triplet? Fact: I goggled “Shaun White Carrot Top” the other night and got a whole bunch of Yahoo Questions asking if they are related. Which, given the general quality of most Yahoo Questions, didn’t exactly make me feel awesome about my powers of observation.
Since when did Jack Skelington get granted citizenship in Christmas Town?!
First, U! S! A! U! S! A! U! S! A! Second, I love the Olympics so take a hike.
I’m confused on if the snowboarding thing being make believe because it is very real and very hard and you can get very hurt doing it.
You can get hurt doing lots of non-sport activities. I think that activities that require a judge to determine who did it the best aren’t really sports. The olympics should be limited to time trials and team and individual sports where people compete directly. The snowboarders also annoy me by wearing baggy pants and big ‘cool’ coats with hoods flopping in the wind behind them. Every other athlete at the games wears basically the same thing Michael Phelps wears when he swims. The snowboarders are just too cool for school.
Those snowpants made to look like denim! Irritating!
Au contraire! I love that we said to our stoner athletes (literally the world’s best) this is America and although America is Team America, we are also a place that is all about the individual, and so we do not all need to look like we are not smoking pot so that we can be on a Wheaties box: you guys can even wear uniforms that look like plaid flannel and baggy jeans! Go, stay true to your subculture, take it bigger, ever upward, remake the world! We here have a huge sense of the variety of life and we love life and you are our champions, Shaun White! USA! Also seriously that dude is UNREAL and I find the Olympics way moving in a way that say, pro football, and movies about sports, usually are not.
If I remember correctly, they have snowboarding because it reaches out to younger people. They are thinking of new sports to add that young people will enjoy. Because apparantly they think all the other sports are boring.
I’m confused on the snowboarding thing being make believe because it is very real and very hard and you can get very hurt doing it.
The most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. The Olympics are a Nationalist blip upon the radar for many, and not much more; an intangible residuum of childhood pleasure.
But go Lysacek.
Yog-Sothoth and Hastur got a medal in pairs ice dancing this afternoon.
I don’t know why you got downvotes for this. Maybe the downvotes came from Crawford Tillinghast’s nefariously multiple accounts, Dr Tillinghast who so wisely has come to dread the results of upvoting those cthonic and unmentionable presences whose lurking in our cosmos goes generally unseen.
Olympics? Hockey, right?
Ducks! Ducks! Ducks!(boo0 Hawks).
errr, I mean, USA! USA! USA! (booo Iceland).
I watch it every night, but maybe that’s because I connect the last winter Olympics with being 16 years old and recently dumped, and sharing my hardships with those of Shaun White and the like.
Can we have a quick talk about this whole luge death sitch? Death is serious (I know because I once died for 3 whole minutes when I fell into the Ice and George bailey pulled me out), but I digress… in a sport which requires that you sit on an ice skate and go 100 mph down a mile long tube made of ice, is dying such a shocking thing that it requires a huge investigation? I mean, I don’t like Georgians dying on insane ice tubes any more than the next guy, but this is a dangerous sport and I think we’re kidding ourselves if we expect someone moving that fast to not have chance of dying when they fall off.
.
end of seriousgum: what does Topher Grace thing about the Olympics?
see below
ok. i’ll take the bait.
1) many lugers were quoted as far back as the 2008-2009 world cup saying that, even for a crazy sport full of crazies, this tracks was by far one of the craziest ever. one luger even said something like “they’re playing with our lives with this track,” which i would link to if google weren’t failing me right now.
2) the canadians knew it was a crazy, dangerous track and still did the dickish home-field advantage thing of waiting until required by olympic rule to let other countries practice on the track.
3) i’m no engineer but was there really no way to design a track that DIDN’T have exposed steel beams right at one of the craziest turns? and even it they did need to be there couldn’t you have put something soft around them?
4) this was the first luging death since 1975 so it’s not like this sort of thing is happening all the time.
all that said, it’s still an insane sport involving insane speeds so it shouldn’t be all that shocking but still, it seems like more preventative measures could have been taken. at the very least it should be a message that maybe we don’t need to continue to push every sport to its breaking point.
Juggalolympian?
I’d watch Topher Grace snowboard.
He seems like more of a luger
(…)
The best part about NBC’s coverage sucking (NBC’s coverage sucks ass btw) is that Dick Ebersol is really taking it up the ass for it. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy!
Eh. I’ll watch the hockey, but otherwise it’s just background TV fodder. On the other hand it reminds me of my week in Vancouver last year, and Vancouver is a very nice town.
my brain has just now come out of the superbowl/mardi gras alcohol binge that my last week and a half was. usually i love love love love the olympics, but i had my own records of hours awake and drinks consumed to break. i think i might just make me a gold medal for surviving.
Eh. I’ll watch the hockey, but otherwise it’s just background TV fodder. On the other hand it reminds me of my week in Vancouver last year, and Vancouver is a very nice town.
[Obligatory CURLING IS WEIRD comment]
Curling is weird?? Have you seen double luge?
Curling is awesome! Too bad I can’t watch it because I’m poor and I don’t get the channels they play it on, grumble grumble. I’m missing all the crazy curling pants too.
I know people say this guy is like the Putin of the ice rink (no one says that), but I have a super secret crush on his whole look. The hair and the sparkly duds are both one part business, one part party. Also, this person was born in 1982? He could use a little of Bob Costas’ youthful glow.
P.S. JOHNNY WEIR WAS ROBBED!!!11!!
Figure Skating = 80s Arena Rock on Ice
I agree. Johnny Weir was robbed. ROBBED!!!!!!!!
I forgot to sign in before posting so this might double-post… oh well
Gabe is watching at all the wrong Olympic moments. I guarantee that he would like the Olympics if he had a compilation video of this week’s commentary by Dick Button. The man is older than Littlefoot’s Grandpa and all he ever says is “THOSE MISTAKES WILL STICK IN THAT ATHLETE’S MIND FOR THE REST OF HIS LIFE. HE WILL NEVER FEEL JOY AGAIN BECAUSE HE HAS SHAMED HIMSELF ON THE WORLD STAGE.” Also, he says these things immediately following a record-setting high score in figure skating.
The point is: NOTHING IS GOOD ENOUGH FOR DICK BUTTON.
Dick Button is the only famous person with an opinion on figure skating worth listening to.
Every time Dick Button opens his mouth there’s a 45% chance he’s about to say something sexist, racist, or just kind of curmudgeonly, but I do love him for still griping about the “new” scoring system four years after they changed it. Pah to skaters who fall on their ass doing a double axel and throw in a triple loop later on to make up for it.
I don’t watch most of the olympics, because most of the olympic sports are boring. Half of them involve just one dude, who is competing against time more than anything else.
It’s like Mario Kart, when you play a game against the ghost of your last race. I’m sure it’s challenging to beat a time record and takes a lot of practice and skill, but why don’t you invite some friends over so the game can at least be entertaining, you loser.
tl;dr – Mario Kart for 2012 Summer Olympics
Personally, I really enjoy the winter games, much more so than the summer ones. I’m a fan of winter sports in general, and it’s nice to actually feel unabashedly patriotic once in a while and root for murika. Also, so many of the events are just fun to watch because they are NUTS and the people who do them are nuts. Watching downhill skiing and being genuinely nervous for each skier that they actually make it down the course without killing themselves is nuts. Watching short-track speed skating is nuts.
I don’t really get to pay attention to these sports outside of these two weeks every four years, so it’s nice and the perfect amount of time to care about these kinds of things imo.
I completely agree. The summer Olympics are dull. The winter Olympics are where it’s AT. I think it’s sort of sad when people don’t care at all. I mean, this is some crazy stuff these people are pulling off.
I thought Shaun White was just a really ugly woman! I was all “Winter O’ Limp Dicks, am I right?” Actually, none of that happened…
Did anyone see US snowboarder Kelly Clark singing like a person possessed before both her runs last night? Hilario.
It’s from the chorus of this Christian praise song. Even more hilario.
Is that what it was?! I was so confused by that. I thought for a minute she was singing really badly along with Miley Cyrus or whatever was blasting from the event speakers and we were going to have an impromptu Miley Cyrus dance party.
Miley Cyrus in the background made it so much better.
I know, right? I hate feeling embarassed for people on tv. She just kept singing and singing and it was so bad. I kept shhh-ing her in my head.
This is what I love about the Olympics though. Our team is so comprised of freaks, eccentrics and weirdos who just have this in common: insane levels of discipline and competitiveness and something bizarre. And they usually seem basically Good. And they usually seem to have a kind of genuine disbelief that they actually just won and are the best in the world. I really like the Olympics, it turns out.
*competitiveness AT something bizarre, I meant.
team downvote. i don’t give a shit about the olympics.
I’ve always loved this Chuck Klosterman article on the ridiculousness of the Olympics http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0804-AUG_AMERICA
The FedEx guy just came in looking very sporty: a colorblock shirt, nylon pants, gloves, and his sunglasses pushed up on his forehead, so it’s like having my own Olympic champion in the office with me.
The figure skaters dressed as clowns were the best thing ever. They skated to “Send in the Clowns”! PAH!
All I know is that the Canadian women’s hockey team has been CRUSHING everything in their path and will obvs win the gold. Those are my girlz!
I signed in to upvote this, cause yay! they’re unbelievable.
but also that is really the extent of my Olympics enthusiasm. I’m holding out for June and the World Cup.
I trained with them when I was younger and I WASTED MY HOCKEY CAREER, so I feel like I owe it to them to watch and cheer. Plus, they are the best.
YEAH! 18-0 against Slovakia? Seriously Slovakia, were you girls even trying?
YEAH! 18-0 against Slovakia? Seriously Slovakia, were you girls even trying?
And the commercials for the Sweden vs. Canada game were like, “FINALLY, A CHALLENGE” but um, no, it wasn’t.
Dang! I was just to the left of that guy with the flag face. I was almost Associated Pressed!
More than anything in the ENTIRE world, I want a pair of Norwegian curling pants.
Aw. It hurts my feelings when people say they don’t like the Olympics. I mean, I get it, we all have different tastes, but come on! They’re so great! Even if you don’t really want to be all “America #1!” there are all kinds of heart-warming, over coming obstacle, Lifetime Original Movie stories involved! And there are absurd clothes, sports that look like frat boys made them up(curling, skeleton),and Johnny Weir (wuz robbed!!). Anyway, as you can see, I heart the Olympics, and think you should too!
I know it’s a normal function of the human body after physical exertion, but, um, did any else get way grossed out by Evan Lysacek’s profuse sweating?? Yuck.
I like these Olympics because they’re on in the middle of the night over here and I’m a bit of an insomniac. Nothing like watching a random Hungarian sliding down an icy mountain for half an hour to bring about the sweet embrace of sleep.
I like these Olympics because they’re on in the middle of the night over here and I’m a bit of an insomniac. Nothing like watching a random Hungarian sliding down an icy mountain for half an hour to bring about the sweet embrace of sleep.
I’m on my way to Vancouver tonight to visit with the international community. Aside from my instinct to drink bottom shelf vodka, I’m going to try and hide my American identity as best I can.
Your avatar… Best. GIF. Ever.
Dang!!! That comment was in reply to Weasels….I hit the reply button, but IT DOESN’T WORK FOR ME!
Yay, Winter Olympics! Boo, NBC coverage! Yay, Ski Cross debuts as an Olympic sport this weekend! Boo, the US men’s ski cross team is injury-plagued and may not medal! Yay, Shaun White crushed it to win Gold! Boo, we pretty much saw that exact same run during the X Games a couple weeks ago!
Gabe. Curling is on. CURLING.
Alexandre Bilodeau is proof that Olympic magic exists. At least for Canadians.
As an American studying in Canada, I have never been so happy for any Olympic athlete ever.
I just watch Al Roker at the Olympics. He is my Olympic buddy.
LUGE: The media made a monster of the track both in the US and here in Canada. The reality is that the other country’s athletes had plenty of practice time on the track as compared to other Olympics in the past. They gave countries 4 weeks total from 2008 nd 2009 winter seasons which is equal if not more than the normal 1 – 2 weeks practice time at winter olympics. Also, the track had a lower crash rate than most luge tracks, and was not the fastest luge track ever built as a lot of people were misquoting.
FIGURE SKATING: I agree with Plushenko that a quad is the next level of men’s skating and that every man should be required to at least attempt one but on the other hand Plushenko’s footwork is terrible and Lysacek’s was perfect so….I would say it would have been a tough call there.
HOCKEY: Our (canada) women are gonna own everything in their path…the men? meh they had to win a shoot-out last game so I would say we’re pretty much screwed unless they clone Iginla to make a new team.
MEDALS: Vonn was a very touching win but seriously, nothing has anything on the Bilodeau Gold, Fred Bilodeau should be on Canadian currency!
And in closing, Wayne freakin Gretzky was in a pick-up truck driving down the street in the rain with the Olympic torch Gabe, come on! The Olympics are cool…..and if that didn’t phase you at all and you still can’t get into the sports, just watch for the epic fails like this:
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/video/article300101.ece?vxSiteId=0bc72527-aa8e-4487-a5e8-94aae448c9dd&vxChannel=Sun%20Exclusive&vxClipId=1347_SUN42639&vxBitrate=300
4 years down the shitter.
Oh glorious Monsters, I love the Olympics with all of my heart. I always have. I love it as much as I love the World Cup. I am a skiier and snowboarder college graduate and a disenfranchised hipster. These multinational sports bring the world together and make my little heart glow.
america, FUCK YEAH
I love the Olympics, especially the winter ones, but I HATE HATE HATE ice dancing. That is not a sport! It’s just the people who aren’t good enough at skating to be figure skaters, and not good enough to be ballroom dancers either. A few of them are okay, whatever, but personally I find watching it like pulling my own teeth. Most of them just flail their arms around like the place is full of mosquitos.
I have actually enjoyed ski-jumping this year though, which is odd because I used to find it boring.
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[IMG]http://i1017.photobucket.com/albums/af300/social86/Letter-To-Cavs-Fans1.jpg[/IMG]
C’mon, man. That guy died…