Beijing and All That

And so, my friends, we've come to the end of the worst Winter Olympics in my lifetime, and possibly yours.  As I type this, it's after midnight in China, which means the 2022 Beijing Winter Games are over.  Now all that's left over are . . . the leftovers, the tape-delayed final events that NBC hasn't aired yet.

While NBC gets a wag of the finger for its coverage and the Russian figure skating coaches get the same for the way they treated that poor girl Kamila Valieva, the hosts - the Chinese Communist Party - get slaps in their faces for infecting the Olympic spirit with severe acute China syndrome.  

China, you're in distress.

It's not just for COVID.  Its for the suppression and the monitoring of activity among not just its citizens but among its guests, the Olympic athletes, and for pretending to let the members of the International Olympic Committee think they were running the show.

And also, a slap in the face for the International Olympic Committee.  Being duped by Commies doesn't make you a martyr; it just means you're as incompetent at running the Olympic movement as Xi Jinping is ruthless at running China.

No doubt about it, this Winter Olympiad was the Sgt. Pepper movie of sporting events - elaborately staged and very expensive but just as pointless and, well, stupid-looking.

Go ask Alice. 

 

Why am I bringing up that 1978 cinematic disaster here?  Watch this space!

All right, on to Cortina d'Ampezzo and Milan for 2026.

Beijing Blech

This Winter Olympiad sucks.

I've had the TV tuned to the Winter Olympics while involving myself in online activities.   My mother has never been able to comprehend how I can possibly go online and watch television at the same time and give both my full attention.  Well, maybe I can't, but it's still a good way to economize my time.  Anyway, I was watching the Olympics while working on my laptop a couple of nights ago, but when it became apparent that the opposite was true, I turned off the TV.  And for good reason.  The competition is dull, the most interesting events don't get decent coverage - would you believe that I've only seen one long-track speed skating race, and it wasn't the one Erin Jackson won? - and there always seems to be one of the following events on when I do tune in . . .  figure skating, freestyle skiing, and curling.

Definitely lots of curling. 

And I don't think I want to see another curling match unless one of those stones blows up.

Another reason not to tune in is because, thanks to the thirteen-hour time difference between New York and Beijing (or the sixteen-hour time difference between Los Angeles, where Mike Tirico is hosting the Winter Games from thanks to COVID, and Beijing),  you know the results of the competition before you see in on TV no matter how hard you may try to avoid hearing what happened.  Oh, sure, I was glad to hear that Kamila Valieva ended up out of medal contention before I saw any figure skating Thursday night, but I also heard who won and, as I expected, there were no Americans who won medals.  By the time the gold-medal game in women's hockey was broadcast late at night, and I lost complete interest in men's hockey once I saw online - again, before seeing it for myself - that Americans were out of medal contention. (Oh great, now Christine Brennan is going to talk again about how well the women have done at the Winter Games and made no attempt to hide her smugness - you can almost hear her thinking, "The women keep winning all of the events the men lose.  Nyahh!")  

And I completely lost interest in skiing - both sexes - when Mikaela Shiffrin got disqualified in a third race. 😢

Do I miss the travelogue features that NBC obviously couldn't do this time due to the COVID outbreak?  No.  I see stories about Chinese culture on the evening news!  And unlike NBC's puff pieces, these stories tell the truth!

Would you believe that the motto of the Beijing Winter Olympics is "Together for a Shared Future?" 

Ha ha, charade you are!

I'm definitely not tuning in to watch the closing ceremony tomorrow night - there are to many other programs on TV tomorrow that I want to watch anyway.  Besides, if the Winter Olympics are so damn terrific, how come NBC, which aired the Super Bowl this past Sunday, devoted so much air time to Super Bowl coverage before the game even started?

What, they don't like curling? 😛

I Got Real Snow

In my previous blog entry, I said that I wanted a Winter Olympiad with real snow.  After I wrote that, northeastern China got . . . snow.

Enough snow to make the artificial-snow course in China unsafe and force some outdoor events to be . . . canceled.  Ironic, no?

Oh, yeah, central and southern New Jersey were forecast to get some snow - but not northern New Jersey, where I live. I woke up yesterday morning to . . . snow.

Right, nothing makes sense anymore . . . 

Downhill

The Beijing Winter Olympics are quickly becoming a wet blanket.

Not only are these Games turning out to be incredibly boring, Team USA's performance is underwhelming, the team being so far down in the medal count it's comparable to our country's place in quality-of-life rankings.

And what I just said may be the wittiest comment I can make about these Winter Games. 

I tried watching last night but I found myself restless and easily distracted.  The women's cross-country skiing barely held my attention, though the women's snowboarding half-pipe competition was slightly more engaging.  Then came the women's slalom . . . and the return of Mikaela Shiffrin, ready to redeem herself after  skiing out of the giant slalom.

Then she skied out a second time.

On live television.  Even when NBC went to a commercial break, a sidebar screen continued to show Shiffrin just sitting there in the snow contemplating her terrible loss.

I couldn't watch after that.  Ahh, there are too many commercials anyway. 

As for what happened to Shiffrin - twice now -  I blame the fake snow. 😠  

Maybe the Winter Games will get better . . . 

After Tokyo

Oh, cripes, is Beijing 2022 coming soon?

The Beijing Winter Olympics are less than six months away, and in place of moving the Winter Games or postponing them until 2023 or 2024 (the centennial year of the Winter Olympics), some wags are suggesting a boycott of the Winter Games if they're held on schedule.  That reminds me of when right-wing columnist Cal Thomas immediately called for a boycott of the 2008 Summer Olympics as soon as they were awarded to Beijing.  

Thomas' sentiment was a knee-jerk reaction back in 2001, but it's a very understandable one now, and I don't need to tell you again the reasons why . . . though COVID remains a big reason.  But after the relatively successful staging  of the 2020 - no, 2021 - Tokyo Olympics these past two weeks, the main reasons for a boycott are likely to center around Chinese oppression of the Uighurs and their use of slave labor.  Not that COVID, which the Chinese government gave the rest of the world, isn't a concern.

So do I, as someone who thought it was a bad idea to award Beijing the 2022 Winter Games in the first place, think we should boycott the Games?  No, no, no, let the American team go.  Boycotts never work, as anyone remembers the 1980 Moscow Olympics boycott remembers.  It didn't get the Soviets to withdraw from Afghanistan, which was the reason of the boycott in the first place (and I'll have more on our own withdrawal from that country another time), and President Carter couldn't even get NATO allies other than Canada and West Germany to join him, though the British government wanted to but the British Olympic team did not, and so they went.  Ironically, members of the British Parliament are calling for a boycott of the 2022 Winter Games now.   Speed skater Eric Heiden, one of the stars of the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York, was against any boycott of any Olympiad.  He was right about boycotts in 1980, and he's right about them now.  This country has never boycotted a Winter Olympiad and we shouldn't start with this one. 

Political disputes never work out, but the Olympics usually do.  A lot of folks thought it was folly to award the Games of the XXIVth Olympiad - the 1988 Olympics - to Seoul, because it was the capital of South Korea, a country that had no diplomatic relations with the Communist bloc nations of eastern Europe and whose government was not considered the legitimate government of Korea by those same nations (they considered the so-called Democratic People's Republic in North Korea to be that), and was also a right-wing dictatorship.  There were calls to move the 1988 Games to avoid boycotts.  But everything worked out in the end.  The Communist countries of eastern Europe attended the 1988 Seoul Olympics, South Korea democratized as a result of holding the Games, and that Olympiad produced memorable moments, especially from Americans such as swimmer Matt Biondi and track runner Florence Griffith Joyner.

Not to mention this cutie-pie. 😊

I'll have more about her toward the end of the month. 😉

Andrew Cuomo?  Relax, I'll get to that . . ..;

As The Tokyo Olympics Near the End . . .

First of all, Allyson Felix won a two more career Olympic medal for a total of eleven, a bronze medal in the 400m race and a gold in the women's 4x400 relay race on a team that was rounded out by Sydney McLaughlin, Dalilah Muhammad, and Athing Mu. This makes Felix the most decorated American track Olympian ever.  And if that weren't enough, Jessica Springsteen earned a silver model in equestrian team jumping. 

Taking bronze medals home to America are Simone Biles on the balance beam and the U.S. women's soccer team while Canada won the gold medal in women's soccer.  And in case you missed it (and you did, because all sports talk these past few weeks has been about the Olympics), the U.S. men's soccer team won the CONCACAF Gold Cup.  Amazing - they could actually be contenders in the 2022 World Cup!

The men's soccer Olympic tournament?  I don't want to talk about it.  (That is, Brazil won.)

Also, congratulations to two more bronze medalists - Molly Seidel in the women's marathon and Paul Chelimo in the man's 5,000m track race.

That out of the way, the turn for the worse in all things COVID requires me to address the Winter Olympics in Beijing.  First of all, despite COVID, they're still on.  Second of all, because the Delta variant made it over from India to China in a spectacular example of what I regard as karma, China is suffering a major outbreak they haven't seen since the Communist government invented the pandemic. Third, despite the delta corona, China is set - dead set - on having the Winter Games in 2022, as scheduled, rather than 2023 (and the pandemic should definitely be over by then).   Needless to say, a lot of people in the West and Americans in particular are ticked off about all this, and bipartisan group of lawmakers in Washington are trying to get the Winter Games postponed, canceled or moved.  Not just over COVID, but for persecution of the Uighurs un Sinkiang, threats against Taiwan, the crackdowns in Hong Kong, and everything else.   

Good luck with that. The Chinese have so much power and influence that they can get away with anything, and nothing is going to stop the Communist government from Beijing in the first place having the Winter Games in Beijing on schedule.  Nothing stopped them from getting the 2022 Winter Games in the first place, despite the fact that Beijing hosted the Summer Games only a decade or so ago.  Certainly not a bid for the 2022 Winter Games from the only other city interested  - Almaty in Kazakhstan.  So, once again, we'll have to watch athletes competing in empty stands and officials not just in face coverings but presumably, because they'll be outside at skiing and bobsled events, hazmat suits.  (Respiratory viruses can spread much faster outdoors in winter weather.)  

Oh yeah, I just found this out about the Winter Games.  Remember when winter Olympiads were only ten days?  That all changed when the organizers of the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary expanded the duration of those Games to sixteen days in part to make room for more winter sports but also to add an additional weekend of competition to please corporate TV sponsors.  And once Winter Olympiads got staggered in alternate even-numbered years, they may have become more important, but they also became more bloated.  In some respects, the change from ten to sixteen days was necessary; the Winter Olympics had gained such scant attention before 1988 that the International Olympic Committee considered getting rid of them all together.  But given that we are now seeing major cities rather than cozy mountain hamlets hosting the Winter Games - the 2026 Winter Olympics will be hosted by two Italian cities, Cortina d'Ampezzo and Milan (Cortina d'Ampezzo alone was enough for the 1956 Winter Games) - was it worth it?

Right. I've been arguing against Beijing hosting the 2022 Winter Olympics since long before COVID hit, mainly because the climate in northeastern China will require a lot of artificial snow to make it work, but now for many more reasons.  I still say, move them to Almaty - as Borat would say, Winter Olympics for make benefit glorious nation of Kazakhstan!

Nice!