Not A Sport!

A
man wearing a ballet suit stands on the three-meter springboard before
diving in. Olympics Games organizers ordered beefed-up
security at all venues after an embarrassing breach involving a Canadian
man who leapt into the pool during a synchronized diving event.(AFP/File/Marco
Longari)

from AFP

We were actually watching the Men’s Synchronized Diving
event when this professional exhibitionist did his thing.  The scandal-phobic
camera crews assiduously avoided showing us this joker, but the announcer,
in a snooty British accent, mentioned that there was "something of a
commotion" as a spectator described as "a streaker in a tutu" had penetrated
the pool area and actually performed a dive before being led off by police.

So what was the Dowbrigade doing watching Synchronized
Diving at 3 in the afternoon on a weekday? Well, for one, we have a week’s
break between semesters, and as usual after the super-intensive lawyers’
program in the summer, we spend several days in a quiet, darkened room
letting our brain cool down.

Besides, we had read about this new sport, synchronized
diving, and wanted to check it out to ascertain if it met the Dowbrigade
criteria to be considered a real sport. We must admit it was gripping
drama. Going into the last round of dives, it was a Superpower Showdown
between the USA,
Russia and China. Hometown favorite  Greece was a surprising fourth,
hoping to sneak in for a medal.

On their last dive, one of the Russians "broke form"
and "assumed an illegal position" so they got a big fat zero and dropped
to last place. Their dive looked perfect to the Dowbrigade, which just shows
how little we know. Then one of the Chinese guys whacked the board
again on his way down, flipping and spinning into the water, with his
foot
fortunately, not his head, and that wiped them out. And finally, one
of the American dudes just spazzed out, went too far away from the board,
perhaps thinking of the Chinese diver, while the other one rolled too
fast and made too big a splash, and just like that, the Greek Olympic
Team won its first Gold Medal in about 2000 years. A supreme moment
in the athletic history of one of the most storied athletic nations
of all time. But it still shouldn’t be an Olympic event.

Which is not to say we didn’t enjoy it.  Watching
each pair of divers attempting to absolutely mirror the motion, timing
and posture of their partner was visually captivating and introduced
a whole other dimension to the already spectacular display of young near
naked bodies involved in the whole diving field.

The nubile young bodies factor has definitely been an
element in the popularity of the Olympics, from the original games, which
were in large part a celebration of naked young bodies and often ended
in bacchanalian drunken orgies, up to the modern day.  How else to explain
the almost universal fascination with "women’s" gymnastics, where  men
and women, young and old, gay and straight, stare transfixed at each
quivering firm gluteus maximus. But it’s not a real sport.

Now, the Dowbrigade is a big fan of competition in all
walks of life. We keep a running mental tab of our "All Time Greatest
Savings" at the supermarket, by store, total amount and percentage. We
count our snail style junk mail and celebrate on days our total is tops
in the office. We give our Business students virtual portfolios worth
$1 million and give a prize to the magnate with the greatest net worth
on the last day of the semester.

The ancient Greeks, in addition to inventing competitive
sports, were fanatically competitive in all aspects of their lives.  They
wouldn’t stage a poetry reading, they would hold a poetry contest.  They
wouldn’t stage a drama festival, but rather a grand drama competition.  Rather
than attend a concert, they would prefer a battle of the bands. But
they knew enough to keep these aesthetic competitions out of the Olympics.

On Olympus we are a purist. Competitive sports must
be played according to rules, and must be objectively scored. In a parallel
to our conversion from Cultural Anthropology to Physical Anthropology
many long years ago, if you can’t see it, count it, measure it or weigh
it, it doesn’t exist for the purposes of the discussion. We want goals,
runs, minutes and seconds, meters (yes, we love meters – so much easier
to play with) and kilometers.  No 8.2 for not sticking the landing.
No 9.4 for "artistic impression."No throwing out the highest and lowest scores to reduce subjectivity.

According to the "Dowbrigade Rule" the following Olympic
Sports are Not Really Sports and should be banned from the Olympics:

Synchronized Swimming – The worst case scenario of a performance art
passing itself off as a competitive sport

Synchronized Diving – see above

Dressage – This involves horses.  The name says it all.

Eventing – Another horse event. The only horse events that deserve to be in
the Olympics should be running (no horse races at all any more) and horse high
jumping. If they want to have a race including obstacles, that’s OK, but it
has to be a RACE. We could see bringing back the Chariot Race as well

Gymnastics – Sorry, Nadia

Artistic Gymnastics – Even less of a case can be made for this pseudo-sport.
You might as well make body-building or the bathing suit portion of the
Miss Universe pageant Olympic sports

Rhythmic Gymnastics – C’mon, how many different positions can you force
these thirteen year old sex symbols to assume?

Trampoline – How about pillow fighting?

There were some hard calls there. For example, it could be argued that
Boxing, especially the Olympic variety where the short fights and protective
headgear practically guarantee that each fight will be decided by the
judges, depends on subjective judgment and a complicated point system.  But
the primordial place of simple hand to hand combat in the Pantheon of
Sports, from ancient times to the present, convinced us to include it
with the "real" sports. Plus, the scoring is actually done largely by
computer these days, making it acceptably objective.

So lets get back to basics. How far, how fast, how high. And let the
"fashion" sports find a home in national championships, on cable television,
in traveling extravaganzas like the Ice Capades.  But not in the
Olympics.