Every four years, like clockwork, the world gets together
and puts its best athletes on a stage to compete to see who has bragging rights
in any particular sport. These games –
known as the Olympics – are broken down into the summer and winter versions;
the winter version is upon us while you are reading this.
In preparation for these highly competitive events, and to
ensure we send only the best of the best to compete, we hold rigorous trials.
These trials are broken down into four different categories,
namely those for speed, such as speed skating, downhill skiing, biathlon,
bobsledding, luge racing, and any other sport where time is a consideration for
winning.
A second category for determining the winner is by counting
points. One such winter sport is ice
hockey. It is a pretty simple scoring
game with one goal equaling one point.
The game lasts a total of three 20-minute periods.
Third, is a length-determined scoring game. One that is a crowd favorite is ski
jumping. A competitor skis off an
elevated ramp attempting to soar as far as possible through the air, then tries
to land on an icy slope several hundred feet away, then skis down. It’s a lot harder than it sounds – much like
golf.
Another category is for aesthetics. Some sports use visual cues as ways to judge
and those methods are always subjective.
Often, the scores are miles apart from judges representing “hostile”
countries. Sports that use these
subjective scoring methods include figure skating.
It is this last category that always intrigues me but, this
year it has me absolutely baffled. You
see, I am not an athlete. In fact, my
most rigorous workout consists of maneuvering a fork into my mouth. But, still, I am allowed to be a critic, as
it is my right as stated in the Twenty-ninth Amendment of the Constitution.
It seems as though a girl who finished a distant fourth in
the aforementioned trials, made the team of three competitors. Why, is a mystery. The second place girl, who never competed in
an international competition, made the team - another mystery.
But, this is not the weirdest part of the winter Olympics
being held in Sochi , Russia
Russian President Vladimir Putin has made it clear that he
is not the human rights president that President Barack Obama is, when it comes
to gay rights. In fact, President Putin
ordered the jailing of gays, much to the chagrin of President Obama.
President Obama was so infuriated by this, that he may have
thought about missing a round of golf – but didn’t – and decided to send an
openly gay delegation to Sochi to attempt to chafe President Putin.
Brian Boitano, and Caitlin Cahow, both openly gay, led the
delegation to somehow make some sort of point.
Perhaps President Obama will help us understand what that point is
someday.
In any case, it would be nice if we didn’t have to use
someone’s sexual orientation and bedroom proclivities to decide who competed in
a sporting event. And it would be nice
if the president concentrated more on that “jobs” thing he ran his re-election
campaign on.
And I didn’t even mention that sport, curling.
