Photo: tkellyphoto from Flickr
For the fourth Olympics in a row, I intended on blogging the Olympics. I’ve been an Olympic junkie since age two, thus writing about the Olympics for my blog or others seems like a no-brainer. I have Winter Olympic encyclopedias on my bookshelf, and my parents currently hold my collection of taped from TV Olympic coverage VHS tapes.
Athens came and went. I was in grad school and was not able to watch until the last night of gymnastics. Turin, I was in a blogging hiatus, with lack of inspiration and an arena of writer’s block. Beijing, I was on a two week trip for my full-time job.
Vancouver was going to change this. I was going to blog. Maybe not every night, maybe not every event, but I was going to blog. My encyclopedic knowledge of figure skating would be on display. My endless search for blog topics would be over.
I settled onto the couch each night to watch the Vancouver Olympics, computer fired up, notebook next to me. Despite NBC’s lacking coverage, I was memorized as only a lifelong Olympics junkie could be. Turn to MSNBC, there’s hockey. Turn to CNBC, there’s curling. Then all of the skiing aerial events, which are just enough on the edge to be exciting, but don’t feature those hoodlum snowboarders with the long hair and iPods. Then, although the coverage couldn’t touch the hours upon hours I remember from my CBS Olympics childhood, there was the figure skating.
The Olympics are just one of those events where you can’t look away, no matter how magnificently manicured the coverage is, how sweetly sappy the fluff profiles are, or how unethically un-amateur the athletes are. It’s a spectacle of sport, the two weeks every two years where sitcoms that have overstayed their welcome and seventeen versions of the same dramatic series are replaced with hours upon prime-time hours of sports. Weird sports. Popular sports. Unpopular sports. Fallen sports. Growing sports. Sports that only Scandinavian nations play. Sports that Russians rule. Sports that only the US and Canada can compete in. Sports that you have to be under five-foot-three to be successful in. Sports that combine two sports into one. Sports that are just competitive, greased up versions of sledding in Uncle Eddie’s backyard in Ontario.
Writing didn’t happen. I sat, dazed at the television screen, and when the delayed late evening news finally began, I would immediately fall asleep wherever I was. The 7 News logo provoked an a Pavlovian response – when it appeared on screen, my eyes shut without effort and asleep I was. I would wake up in the morning, and realize for yet another night, I didn’t blog. I would resolve that that night would be the night when I finally did.
And through two weeks of the Olympics, that never happened. While I didn’t blog, and thus was a gold medal example of how not to grow or maintain your blog readership, I enjoyed. If you don’t take that time to sit back and enjoy a sporting event every once and a while, without the blogging, Tweeting and analysis, you begin to lose why you even love sports in the first place.
Vancouver, thanks for the refresh.
