Wide World of Pseudo Sports

My friend Andrew Travers maintains a weekly sports column for the Aspen Daily News and, as a follow up to the sky-diving post, I thought I'd share his take and opinion of how our trip relates to the Olympic GAmes

THE INTERLOPER’S REPORT

"Wide World of Pseudo-Sports"

By Andrew Travers
Roaring Sports Columnist

There is little comfort in waddling toward an open airplane door at 14,000 feet, preparing to hop out of the thing with a stranger strapped to your back.

As I did so recently in California with my dumbest, drunkest, best boyhood friends, I tried to put on my fiercest no-fear face but ended up with a threadbare mug of false confidence (think Christopher Walken playing Russian roulette in “The Deer Hunter”).

I bit my trembling lip, closed my eyes and went to my Happy Place – a place that sounds like the voice of Margo Timmons, tastes like my mother’s Yorkshire pudding, smells like the Mississippi River’s dawn fog, and looks like Cathedral Lake in autumn.

The Happy Place didn’t do me much good as we inched toward the open door, a hard wind on my face, the earth’s surface looking unforgivingly firm and a very long way down. What did help me out was the fact that the stranger strapped to my back jumped out of planes for a living and, ostensibly, he knew what he was doing.

This guy did this a dozen times a day. He had devoted his life to jumping out of planes – a concept so bizarre that it distracted me enough not to notice I was already free-falling at a hundred-whatever miles-an-hour toward that solid NorCal dirt.

I can’t fathom why a perfectly sane athlete would make skydiving his raison d'être anymore than I can understand devoting your waking hours to, say, the pommel horse. Or handball. But at least if you make those sports your life you have the chance, every four years, to display your prowess on a world stage representing your motherland.

Yes, every four years we give these idiosyncratic athletes their due in the Summer Olympics, and we get passionate as all-get-out about sports we normally wouldn’t watch even if we were paid handsomely and given a shiatsu rubdown during the viewing.

But here we all are, predictably with Olympics Fever, gorging on a buffet of pseudo-sport.

“Dude, party at my place tonight. Sofiya Velikaya is up against Rebecca Ward in the bronze medal match for women’s saber fencing!”

“Ya?”

“Ya. Then A.J. Kruger is up in the hammer throw!”

“Word. I’ll toss on my star-spangled unitard and bring some guac and chips.”

“Boosh! It’s on, broham.”

Sound familiar?

Some would say the scourge of steroids has sullied the Games here in the post-Marion Jones era. But, on the bright side, it has made women’s track an oddly voyeuristic treat (normally you have to go to Tijuana to watch a half-dozen pre-op trannies run in circles).

But I kid. I don’t mean to denigrate what these guys are doing over in Beijing. It is impossible to deny the mastery of these competitors and hard not to root for an indomitable red-white-and-blue force like swimmer Michael Phelps. And I defy anyone to keep their heart-rate steady during the 100 meter footraces.

Additionally, it is a matter of fact that any of the kids in the Olympic Village could handily kick the shit out of me. Even, like, a benchwarmer on the French women’s badminton team. So I don’t want to ruffle any feathers here.

This year, with America on the precipice of economic shambles, the U.S. team has taken on a scrappy, kids-from-the-wrong-side-of-the tracks character, as they compete in the belly of red China – a sharp-toothed bully of a country to whom we owe so much money that they basically own us. Which makes cheering for our boys and girls a lot more fun, in a Rocky vs. Drago kind of way.

So, stick a finger in the jaundiced Commie eye and bring back lots of gold for us, Team U.S.A.

I’ll petition for tandem skydiving to get admitted as an Olympic “sport” in 2012.


Andrew Travers wants to legally change his name to Hope Solo, in tribute to the U.S. women’s soccer goalie. But his e-mail will remain andrew@aspendailynews.com

[Aspen Daily News]