Cru Jones Society

 

You know swimming. You’re waiting for track & field. Gymnastics dominates prime time programming. Everyone watches these sports. I spent a good chunk of my weekend watching some of the other Olympic offerings. Below are three events for which I have some thoughts. I promise not to mention any of the people you’re nearing your saturation point with (see Phelps, Michael. Johnson, Shawn. And Ming, Yao.). I’m willing to bet you haven’t heard anyone talk about men’s team volleyball though, have you?

Equestrian – Saturday, 8:00 a.m.

Lady E had a work event to attend early in the morning, and despite my best efforts, I woke up with her. In addition to being awake much earlier than I’d ideally like on a Saturday, I had a bit of a hangover too. The great thing about Olympic season is that no matter what time of day it is, you can find something on TV to recover with and waste away your day.

So when I woke up, I knew there’d be something to lounge about with while I either fell back to sleep or gradually woke up. I clicked on the TV thinking to myself, “Anything but equestrian… Anything but equestrian… Fuck me, it’s equestrian.”

I cannot grasp why this is an Olympic sport. The horse does all the work. The event I watched is evidently called “dressage” and you can read the absurdly long wikipedia article about it here. Since I’m a complete ignoramus about this event, I watched as the horse trots around the ring, down the middle stripe, then turns its head and walks like it’s drunk trying to find its way home by looking out of only one eye. They go this way, and they go that way, and they crisscross the ring on a meandering path for five agonizing minutes.

At the end of the event, the lady from Jamaica gets off her horse, hugs some dude (as seems to be required at the end of every Olympic event) and awaits her score. It comes up and her score is something weird like “Deductions: -56.5.” Lady E looks at it and says, “Wow, -56. That’s a lot of deductions.”

So I say, “Is it? I don’t even know. What the hell is the scale here?”

Lady E says, “Actually, I have no idea. Maybe that’s a great score.”

I have no doubt that it take a lot of training to get the horse to do whatever the hell it’s being judged on during dressage, but that doesn’t mean it deserves to be an Olympic sport. If you’re going to include equestrian in the Olympics based on the fact that it’s certainly difficult to train a horse, then why isn’t dog sled racing in the winter Olympics? Why not those adorable parrots who rollerskate and dunk miniature basketballs? My uncle trained his dog to moan while he licks his own nuts, which I’m sure took forever and resulted in being a hell of a lot more entertaining than watching a horse walk fancy. That’s not in the Olympics. Needless to say, equestrian is lost on me.

Although, I suppose the silver lining is that after 15 minutes of equestrian, I got up off my ass and took care of all my errands by 9:30, before it got hot and before the traffic sucked. And I got myself a Gatorade and a packet of Dunkin’ Sticks which killed the hangover pretty effectively. So that was good.

Equestrian: So boring to watch, you get shit done. That’s the new tagline.

Male Volleyball – Saturday, 3:30 p.m.

I love volleyball. I love playing it and I love watching it. The only thing that annoys me is watching the players hug, high five, and congratulate each other after every freaking point. It doesn’t matter if they win or lose the point, everyone on the floor meets in the middle and does some back-patting. Are volleyball players really this insecure? Do they need reassurance and/or congratulations after even the most mundane plays? I thought this was confined to women since I haven’t watched male volleyball since I was 10, but I was wrong.

Even the men have to glad hand each other after every single point. Why? Can you imagine if this happened in other sports? Adam Dunn grounds out to Tulo, Tulo throws it to Helton, and everyone meets on the mound to congratulate each other on one of 27 necessary outs. Considering volleyball plays up to five sets where there’s an average of at least 40 combined points each game, you can see why I view this as excessive. If I were on the team, I’d certainly end up snapping at my teammates after about 15 times of having to slap hands with everyone. “He just served it out of bounds! Why do we have to jack each other off again? Leave me alone!” And then I’d get thrown off the team.

On the flipside, I love men’s volleyball just because of how ridiculously hard the guys spike it. The setter gently lofts it into the air where some giant beastman leaps up, loads it into his potato gun, sprays some Aqua Net on his hand, and blasts it into some poor schmuck’s face. The sport combines two of my favorite things: Power and shame inflicted via 100 mph volleyball.

Synchronized Diving – Sunday, 6:00 p.m.

I said to Lady E, who was cooking dinner at the time, “I don’t understand the point of synchronized diving. I mean really, what the hell is this?” I then wondered to myself if the Olympic committee was high at some point and thought, “Y’know, I like the beauty and artistry of diving, but this one diver at a time shit is plaaaaaayyyyyyed, man. We gotta get two people up there. And they have to dive at the same time. And we’ll judge them by how well they stay in sync even though that’s pretty much impossible. Are you writing this down? And do we have any Doritos left?”

After watching for 10 minutes, I then said to Lady E, “I don’t give a shit what the purpose of this is. It’s fucking badass to watch!”

And it is. It’s incredible eye candy watching two people do a reverse two-and-a-half at the same time. When you combine it with a pork chop, some baked beans, and a Leinenkugel Honey Weiss brought to me by Lady E, you’ve got one happy E Dagger. Unfortunately the Americans finished just out of the medals, but whatever. They were by far the cutest of the teams well ahead of China (the winners), Russia (the silver medallists and somewhat mannish), and Germany (the bronze medallists – also really, really tall).

I’m sad only the men have synchronized diving left since although I’d like to watch, I don’t care for watching their shorn bodies covered by only a tiny Speedo wherein it appears they’re smuggling grapes. Maybe that’s just me.

Follow up: After writing this I did end up watching the men dive together. Yeah, ha ha, E Dagger’s gay. Whatever. Anyway, I was less distracted by the dainty men, their shaved chests, tiny swimsuits and effeminate manner of speech, and more distracted by the awful bitch commentator. Since it’s been four years since I watched diving last, I had forgotten what a miserable killjoy this lady is. No matter how pretty the dive is, she always jumps right in there and spoils the fun pointing out some minute flaw no one at home could possibly catch and harps on it. You’re at home enjoying watching two ambiguously gay dudes flip around manically in perfect tandem, and she shits on your parade. By the end of the men’s synchronized platform diving competition, I was tangibly angry at her.

But I’ll save that for Thursday when I offer some thoughts about the Olympic commentators. Hart will take a minor detour from the Olympics tomorrow, but I’ll be back Thursday and you can look for a Happy Friday with some Olympic-related and inspired links. As always, keep it locked on the CJS.

Until next time…

edagger@crujonessociety.com