Olympics musing

I've been watching the Olympics with one eye this week...well, the wife has been watching them, I'm just in the same room. Which just proves that I form opinions unconsciously, like an oyster making a pearl out of a grain of sand (hey, it's my blog, I can spout self-aggrandizing nonsense if I want!)

First, I like the addition of 'extreme sports' to the Olympics.
Not because snowboarding is amazingly fascinating, but because the subculture is relatively new to the spotlight and the performers haven't internalized the book of hackneyed sports cliches that reduce athlete/journalist interactions to the level of Kabuki theater. Snowboarders will say things that surprise the interviewers, and the audience, which entertains me. It's like the USOC forgot to invite them to the media indoctrination sessions that steam the spontaneity out of the starts of more established sports.

Second, what the fuck with the ice staking judging.
Weren't they supposed to 'fix' it after the 'controversy' with the French judge and the dual gold medals last time out?
There was a Chinese pair in second place, they started their program with some outlandishly difficult trick and it went so far wrong they had to stop for a couple of minutes and regroup- the gal ate shit so bad she landed knees-first on the ice and slid fifteen yards into the wall and looked dazed for a couple of minutes.

After a pep talk from her coach ("skate bitch, unless you want to be assembling hard drives for a living!") she pulled it together and they finished their program.

Great, they overcame disaster and finished their routine- good human interest stuff of the sort the Olympics feed us like geese being pumped up for Foi Gras.

But wait...the scoring comes in, and THEY'RE STILL IN SECOND PLACE.
WTF? Why bother skating the long program if you can eat shit so badly they stop the music and call a doctor yet go nowhere in the standings? I don't get it.

I'm not much for figure skating anyway, leaning more toward Bonecrusher Smith than Peggy Fleming, but why bother watching if people can flame out and still win medals?