They Weren't Hungary Enough

The Hungarian capital city of Budapest (below), which was vying to be the first city from the old Warsaw Pact bloc since 1980 to host the Summer Olympics, is vying no more.  A combination of local politics and doubts about the costs involved caused the city to withdraw its bid for the 2024 Games. It looks like the athletes aren't going to be sampling authentic goulash after all.

To be fair, Budapest was a long shot, going against two cities that had the experience and the resources to pull off a summer Olympiad, Los Angeles and Paris.  Many people in Hungary didn't want the Games, being fearful that the costs would invite corruption.  Budapest's city fathers were reluctant about the whole idea, only having gone along with it because the Hungarian Olympic Committee was urging them to. Katinka Hosszú must really be bummed about the lost opportunity to shoot for swimming in the Olympics with a home-court (or home-pool) advantage.

This leaves only Los Angeles and Paris remaining in contention for the 2024 Games.  My money is on Paris.  See, French centrist presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron is likely to finish behind right-wing extremist Marine Le Pen in France's presidential election this spring.  But because of François Fillon, the third candidate, no one will get a majority, and so there will be a runoff.  However, once Fillon - whose downfall is the most rapid one I've ever seen of a candidate for national office since Gary Hart in These States back in the late eighties - is out of the way, Macron should defeat Le Pen easily in the runoff.  Thus, France will have a respectable president, whereas we'll still have Donald Trump.  And as I wrote back in November, the International Olympic Committee is probably in no mood to award the Games to a country that elects a rhymes-with-glass-pole as its leader, like Trump . . . or Le Pen.  Also, Paris hasn't hosted the Games since 1924, and Los Angeles has hosted it twice since then.  And, Paris has lots of culture.  Los Angeles's culture is restricted to the yogurt section at the local Safeway.

In fact, I'm rooting for Paris.  Yes, I know that my Olympic heartthrob Janet Evans is Vice Chair of the Athletes Commission for the Los Angeles bid.  And believe me, it kills me to have to take a position against hers, but it's nothing personal. 

Flying Out of Rio

Well, another summer Olympiad has come and gone, and now it's time to bid adieu, goodbye, and all that other stuff, as we put Rio de Janeiro behind us.  And, as is my custom, I'd like to acknowledge everyone who got me interested enough in the Games to comment about it here.

I'd like to thank Allyson Felix, Clayton Murphy, Emma Coburn, and Jenny Simpson for their achievements in track and field, Simone Manuel for her breakthrough in the pool, Simone Biles for her gymnastic achievements, and Simone de Beauvoir for writing feminist literature that had to have inspired Title IX.

Special thanks also go to Nathan Adrian and Ryan Murphy for their feats in swimming, as well as to Maya Dirado and Lilly King for theirs, and all the U.S. swim relay teams, as well as thanks to all the other victorious athletes that I don't know from Adam or Eve who made these Games enjoyable.

No thanks to Ryan Lochte for his inexplicable and dubious achievement outside the pool.

(Oh, yeah, regarding my ladyfriend who was hot for Ryan Lochte . . . yeah, she got over him . . . before the bathroom incident. )

Gymnastics coach Martha Karloyi is following her husband Bela into retirement after having built the women's gymnastics program in These States from nothing into much more than something.  Thanks for the memories, guys, and thank you especially, Bela, for your unbridled enthusiasm for women's sports.  Shane Tusup can't hold a candle to you.

And thanks to Shane Tusup, Katinka Hosszú's husband, for his own wild enthusiasm.  I haven't seen anything like that in the Olympic bleachers since Michelle Kwan's dad! :-D And thank you, Katinka Hosszú, for being totally responsible for your swimming medals.

Special thanks to the Danish men's handball team for enlivening - and unexpectedly winning - the men's team-handball gold-medal game against France. You guys rock!

Thanks also to the commentators who covered these Olympics, especially Rebecca Lowe for that cool, British accent.  No thanks to Dan Hicks for demonstrating to me why media critics don't like him very much.

As always, I thank Mary Carillo and Tom Brokaw for their reports about Brazilian culture, especially Mary Carillo's report on the woman who inspired "The Girl From Ipanema." I also give credit, however begrudgingly, to figure skaters Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir for their own Brazilian travelogue segments.  Lipinski has never been a favorite athlete of mine, because she's so full of herself, but she did a good job.  So did Johnny Weir - but please, Johnny, please get yourself a fashion consultant!

Thanks also to models Gisele Bündchen, Adriana Lima and Alessandra Ambrosio for being a part of these Games, be it in the opening ceremony or through paling around with Ryan Seacrest, but how come no one invited those two other Brazilian beauties from the modeling world, Gisele Zelauy and my favorite Brazilian model, Dalma Collado, to join in? It's not because they're over forty, is it?

Paulo Pimenta is a Facebook friend of mine from Brazil, and I connected with him through the models I have befriended on social media.  He's been enjoying the Rio Games up close and personal. Thanks to my social-media connections, I have also connected on Facebook with . . . Gisele Zelauy. I dedicate my commentary on the Rio Games to them. :-)

There weren't that many memorable television commercials related to the Olympics, but there was one good one - a Reese's peanut butter cup ad showing winter Olympian Lindsey Vonn (a skier) trying her hand at non-winter sports with great difficulty. I'd like thank her for making such an entertaining commercial.  Lindsey, you are so adorable in that ad - and you totally got this! :-D

And thanks to the late Maya Angelou for reading her poetry in commercials for iPhone and the University of Phoenix.  Yes, that was sarcasm.  Whose stupid idea was it to play the recorded voice of a dead woman reading her own poetry in commercials, anyway, especially for an online diploma mill?  Not cool.

And a special thank you to Usain Bolt - I'm gonna miss you, man! - as well as very special thanks to Michael Phelps . . . 

 . . . for going out on top like no athlete ever has gone out or ever will.

And most of all, thanks to Katie Ledecky for her monumental accomplishments in the pool.  

 

This is Katie Ledecky with the great Janet Evans, who more or less passed her distance swimming crown to Katie.

Isn't she cute?

I don't mean Katie Ledecky. :-D

And speaking of Janet Evans . . . well, I saved my most important gratitude for last.  Although Evans has not competed in the Olympics since 1996, I found it impossible to comment on this summer Olympiad, or the previous one, without mentioning her at least once.  Which leads me to draw the obvious conclusion:  When it comes to writing about the Summer Olympics, she is, for better or for worse, my muse.  How could she not be?  Evans, as Hannah Storm told her in 1996, set the standard for what it means to be an Olympian in and out of competition, and her standard remains.  Why else would Evans appear on a Wheaties box only now, in 2016?  So, in addition to wishing her a happy birthday in advance (she turns 45 next Sunday), I'd like to thank her for the inspiration to blog about the Olympics, now and for all time.

Although she may find some of my comments a little too cynical . . .

And so we look with 2020 vision to the next Summer Olympics.  Gee, Mom, I want to go . . . straight back to Tokyo . . . :-D

Sex and Sexism the Olympics

Who'd have thought the biggest delicacy discovered at the Olympics in Rio would be a Pita covered in oil? :-D

Ha ha! I am referring to Pita Taufatofua, of course.  He's the Olympic athlete who was the flag bearer at the 2016 Olympics' opening ceremony for Tonga, a Pacific island country heretofore known for issuing postage stamps in silly shapes.  The judo competitor appeared at the ceremony shirtless, his torso covered in oil.  (No doubt he upstaged the U.S. of A.'s flag bearer, Michael Phelps.)  And women loved it; they ogled Taufatofua's well-oiled physique so much that their husbands must have been . . . scared shirtless! :-D

I wrote back in 2012 during the London Games that I have no trouble with women checking out the men at the Olympics, because after all, men check out the women too.  (Beach volleyball's Kerri Walsh-Jennings is still hot, by the way.)  But I have yet to hear any women make derogatory or dismissive comments about male athletes at these Games, while men have been making so many comments like that about female athletes that to list such sexist remarks in their entirety on this blog would take too long. So I'll focus on just two of the many misogynistic swipes - the number of which is rapidly approaching triple digits - in the coverage of these Games.  

One comment was a product of what Brad Paisley might call "accidental sexism."  When Hungarian swimmer Katinka Hosszú won a gold medal, NBC commentator Dan Hicks called her coach/husband Shane Tusup as "the man responsible" for her victory . . . as if Hosszú herself had nothing to do with it.  Hicks apologized, explaining that he meant that Tusup's coaching was a notable factor in her victory and regretting that his attempt to convey credit for Tusup for his role as a coach didn't come out right.  Gee, ya think, Dan?  Okay, had Hosszú's coach been a woman, Hicks might very well have called her coach "the woman responsible" for Hosszú's win, and a coach's contributions to the performance of any athlete of either sex are key to an athlete's successes.  But what if Hosszú had been kept off the medal podium by her competitors, and what if her husband were still her coach?  Would her husband have been called the man responsible for her loss?  I doubt it. I'm sure Hannah Storm - Dan Hicks is her husband, you will remember - would agree with me.  

For the record,  I may have said that Tusup was an asset for Hosszú, but I never said he deserves all the credit for her wins.  In fact, I have since been led to understand that his coaching style is so unorthodox and punishing, she may be winning despite his coaching methods.      

The other comment that caught my eye was when Tim Bannon of the Chicago Tribune reported that Corey Cogdell won the bronze medal in women's trap shooting and primarily identified her as the wife of Chicago Bears lineman Mitch Unrein.  That's all she is - a football player's wife?  What?  What's up with this Bannon guy, anyway?  Did he consider Cogdell's victory insignificant because it was only a bronze medal? Or because he thinks trap shooting isn't a real sport like football?  Is he upset that Chicago didn't get the 2016 Olympics?  Or is he peeved that American football isn't taken very seriously outside These States?  I could go on and on making such conjectures (and I would if I had nothing better to do today), but diminishing Cogdell to a mere spousal status is flat-out degrading.  Was Florence Griffith Joyner ever called Al Joyner's wife?  No, because she was a greater track athlete than he was.  (Jackie Joyner-Kersee was also a better track athlete than her brother Al as well, and no one ever called her Al Joyner's sister.)      

Oh yeah, I ought to tell you also about a sexist swipe People magazine had in its special 2016 Olympics issue, which hit the newsstands before the Games began, in one of its items about Olympians past.  American track star Michael Johnson was referred to as the first person to win the 200-meter and 400-meter track races in the same Olympiad. Actually, that was American Valerie Brisco-Hooks, who did it in 1984 at the Los Angeles Olympics; Johnson won both races in the 1996 Games.  Johnson was the first man to win both races in the same Olympiad, and the second woman to achieve that feat, France's Marie-Jose Perec, did so in 1996, the same year as Johnson's accomplishment.  Hey, I love Michael Johnson, he's a cool customer . . . but let's set the record straight here - and not diminish Brisco-Hooks's achievement! 

Alas, this sort of thing is likely to continue.  And if you think all this obsession with Pita Taufatofua is trivial nonsense but, at the same time, you have no problem with comments from guys like Hicks or Bannon (at least Hicks apologized) because you don't see the problem, well, you have a problem yourself.  

Katinka!

Meet Katinka Hosszú of Hungary, the world's newest Olympic swimming star!

She just set a new world's record in the women's 400-meter individual medley, and she won her race by a wide margin.

In addition to being naturally talented, she has an asset in the form of her husband Shane Tusup, who is both her coach and her cheerleader.  And if you've been watching the Olympics, you can tell that Shane takes both of his jobs . . . very seriously. :-D

Anyone who competes against her in any of her upcoming events has her work cut out for her.