Domo Arigato

Well, my Olympic commentary for the 2020 - no, 2021 - Tokyo Olympics was far more measured than my commentary on previous Olympiads, but while I did more commentary on these Games that I expected to,  I certainly didn't post multiple times in one day like before, and the reality of COVID put a damper on most of my efforts at satire.  As for how the Games went, well, I have to admit, it wasn't the disaster I expected it to be.  But watching these Games wasn't the same as in previous years.

This is where I usually offer acknowledgements to those who inspired me to watch and comment.  Yeah, I have some of those - just not as much as before, again, because of the pall cast over this Olympiad - an Olympiad the Japanese people didn't really want at this time.  But it did go off with far fewer hitches than I expected.

In that spirit I'd like to thank the organizers for pulling off the Games in the middle of a worldwide health crisis.  I'd also like to thank NBC and its sister networks for all of its wall-to-wall coverage, and I'd especially like to thank NBC for cutting back on the athlete sob stories and also having virtually no Japanese travelogue stories as a result of COVID - because CBS gave us enough geisha-girl and sumo stories when it covered the Nagano Winter Olympics in 1998. 

I'd like to thank all of the athletes who competed so marvelously, though I don't remember all of their names.  (I don't remember any of them, hardly.)  But I'd especially like to thank Katie Ledecky for all of her gold-medal and silver-medal victories, including her historic third consecutive win of the 800-mter freestyle and her win of the inaugural women's 1500-meter "metric mile" freestyle a well. Let's drink to the woman who can set a record in the preliminaries on Monday and breaks it in the final on Tuesday!  You Katie, are the greatest female distance swimmer ever.  I hear you want to compete in Paris three years hence.  Go for it!  I can't wait - perhaps this time they'll have live spectators! 

And I so think you could be a great archer. 😊

(But don't worry, Janet Evans - you're still my Olympic heartthrob. I'll have more to say about that later this month. 😉) 

Special thanks go to all of the road-race cyclists for remembering that in Japan they ride on the left side of the road and avoiding collisions with each other. (Well, all of the jokes can't be good, especially during COVID, you gotta expect that once in awhile!) 

Setsuko Koike is a Japanese woman who was an exchange student at Drew University in New Jersey when I was there in the eighties.  We liked each other, and we tried to keep in touch when she returned to Japan, but we only exchanged a couple of letters.  I still think of her from time to time.  I dedicate my coverage of the Tokyo Olympics - what there was of it - to her.

Thanks also to Michael Phelps for doing commentary for NBC on swimming - good, he's still around! - and, on a more serious note, also speaking plainly and honestly on mental heath.  And finally, thanks to Simone Biles for being an inspiration to those who deal with mental-health issues on a regular basis. 

And might I make a statement in the second person to those who called Simone Biles soft for withdrawing from all of those gymnastics events?

Fellas, you got a lot of damn gall to call Simone Biles soft and attack her integrity as an athlete.   I mean . . . I mean . . . I mean . . . I mean, I'm sitting here at home watching guys like you bloviate negatively about a young black female athlete struggling with mental health and trying to keep herself physically safe - I mean, I'm watching you bash Simone Biles - because guys like you, guys who sit in a Barca-Lounger in a horizontal position and are too lazy to even get the remote on the other side of the room to change the TV channel and have beer bellies large enough to make you resemble Marcello Mastroianni in A Slightly Pregnant Man, think you're qualified experts on women's athletics!

Yeah, yeah, I know.  You don't like my kind.  After all, I stand up for black women and I like to see European movies.  Suck it up, dudes.

And thus concludes my commentary on the 2020 - no, 2021 - Olympics.  Sorry none of us spectators cold be there in person.

We'll always have Paris.