There's been enough to aggravate me about Olympics coverage this year that it will certainly cover me for the next two before the next Winter Games, which, come to think of it, I have no idea where they're taking place. (Runs to consult all-knowing reference.)

Turin. Torino, as it's known. I guess once they finally got that shroud thing out of the way, tourist trap B had to be put into place at once, huh? Anyway. I'll get annoyed about that when the moment comes.

My main gripe about Olympic coverage is that NBC's prime time lineup takes place when it's somewhere like 4 AM in Athens. Therefore, every one of these events could be shown in their entirety, on several different television stations. Instead, we get skips, breaks, excerpts, pieces, and usually nothing that doesn't relate to Americans.

Let me clarify that last complaint. I'm not one of those people who runs around saying "Oh, whyyyy don't you cover any of the other countries? All you care about is Amerrrica, and how can we be proper citizens of the world if we root only for the big, bad, United States?" And the answer is, Kiss my ass. You're watching an American television station, and the reason that the Canadian television station can show the Cameroonian sport-fishing delegation is the Canadian sprinters got their asses handed to them in the preliminaries. If you want to be a citizen of the world, get a big-ass satellite dish. Americans want to watch Americans.

That said, I like watching cool sports. I'm all for water polo, even though the US isn't very good at it, or badminton, where they play like your backyard game would be if everyone were on meth. If I have to watch exclusively non-Americans to appreciate this, no problem. I can understand that there's not much of a badminton-on-meth presence here in the States, and how else will we get the slug-colored children off of the skateboards and onto their feet?

Anyway, one of the events that was predetermined that we NEEDED to see last night was the "Gymnastics Gala," which consisted of all the medal-winning gymnasts performing their routines to spotlights and music for no points, "just because." So that means that there's no competition whatsoever. Now you know what this means to Olympics organizers: 18,000 more asses in the seats to the usually popular gymnastics events (though at this Games, that translates to about 4,000) because, well, we set up all the stuff.

Number one. If this gymnastics stuff is so damn popular, why don't they show it instead of the macabre "Father of the Pride" if people are willing to watch it so much? Number two, there's enough actual competition going on that we shouldn't waste time on the flippy youths. They aren't even performing the same routines they won the medals with; I watched an elfin Romanian jump up on the pommel horse and clap his hands. He did no dismount. Then, we went back to the decathlon, where we got to see an American and a Kazakh throw a javelin apiece.
The commentators sit there mute, so that you can hear the music better. Never mind we only got to see bits and pieces of other events so that we could see this. We just couldn't pass up a chance to see those adorable little sprites again, couldn't we?

Umm, no.

I'll leave it to others to expand this argument, but most of the gymnasts I've seen were alternately sullen or pouty, with faces that, once the obligatory smile had been given to the judges, resemble those of someone being marched to the gas chamber. I blame this on the victory of the Eastern European sports system in gymnastics, which says that you essentially have to train from the time you're an infant and ignore debilitating injuries and get hollered at in several languages. People pretend to be offended by this for 3 years eleven months at a time.

In addition, if non-scoring events are deemed worth are time during the Olympics, why not add in such zero-scoring non-achievement hippie sports like juggling sticks, hacky sack, and staring at a Jimi Hendrix poster on acid?

Tsk, tsk, tsk. But you don't understand because you're a MAN. The profiles, the gymnastics, the weepy piano music, the inexplicable decade-long presence of John Tesh, these weren't for you, a man who'd watch televised lacrosse. They're for women who don't care who threw what ball through which orifice. You get ESPN the rest of the year. Can't women have the Olympics?

No. The Olympics are about sports. That's the whole point. The years that the Olympics were really, really interesting were the years in which Hitler or the Communists wanted to kick everybody's ass, and pumped their athletes full of drugs to do so. (Germans in the '36 Games were on stimulants.) Cities don't bid on World Checkers Tournaments. You ask Doug Collins about being rooked out of a medal in 1972 and he probably still gets so upset that he loses count of how many possessions it will take to erase a nine-point deficit (it's three to tie and four to win, and that's what it takes to make the tall dollars as a broadcast analyst these days, apparently) It's "our guys can beat your guys." And the means they choose to do it aren't via gunfire (though we're pretty skilled at that part as well) but through sport.

"Ohhh, but it's not about winning, but the spirit of competition."

Bullshit. That thing on the front page says medal count, not "true moments of sportsmanship" or "heartfelt expressions of true joy." I've done a triathlon and there were both, but it ain't the Olympics. (I also did a training run using EAS KickStart, which has 199mg of caffeine and an unusual flourescent green glow, and rationalized my taking it with the same sentence.)

Lifetime, Hallmark, and Oxygen are not showing any Olympics coverage. And if they want to amp up the Olympics coverage a little and create an event such as Drunken Beach Fencing, that's fine by me too.

And please, after all this Olympian excitement, what do we get next week? Why, the Republican National Convention! It's enough to make you want to take your toe off with a belt-sander.