Roads, Mills, Laps

Around 9 last night, I found myself with a handful of Bethany Beach fudge in my mouth. I had been watching the $40M opening ceremonies. I mumbled (bragged?) to members of my extended family that there was a chance that I had actually spoken to one of the hard-working athletes who were parading in front of the cameras at that very moment (the U.S. contingent had just entered the stadium). I half expected to see Ryan Hall or Nick Symmonds on the screen; I half expected to jump up and down and say that I have their voice still on my Best Buy/Nixonian digital tape recorder. Even when the South African team walked on, I half expected to see Ramaala or when it was Kenya’s turn, Catherine the Great. I expected something to raise my fudge finger in the air at.

No.

I got nothing. I am fully accustomed to disappointment at this stage of my life and I should have expected it then.

When it was time for team ‘Merica to walk into the limelight, the cameraman was obviously an NBA fan, because we got to see the redeem team for an unusually long amount of time. We got to see Kobe Bryant, strutting like an ostrich, snapping his gum–all relaxed; his arms limp at his side, awaiting a basketball to be thrown to him at any moment; awaiting to “take it the hole.” We got to see Bob Costas’ band of merry Olympic celebrities, the NBC cast of superheroes who we will be constantly reminded of throughout the Olympiad: Phelps, Gay etc. (Remember that zany Flying Tomato 2 years ago?) And the “redeem team:” Let us never forget these under-covered, distinguished giants. They don’t get on TV that much, so we should zoom in on them and let them be actors, playing the chewing gum-chewing Americans in some unpublished Bertolt Brecht play about ugly American stereotypes.

Lord God, creator of all that is good and just, bless us with a Chicom Gold for the redeem team, because first-place medals belong in the wide palms of superstar American professionals. And the Chicom gold-plated basketball coach whistles belong the mouths of the rooster-strutting Coach Normand Dale types who’ve always got a life-changing proverb at the tip of of their tongues.

We Americans love our sprinters–hot damn do we or what? We love to hover around the track for 9 point whatever-it-is-these-days seconds and then going on to doing something else. We never love to wait for anything; we like Fast Pass and reset buttons. We love on/off switches and instant results. We hate chess matches and marathons. We don’t wait well. In high school and college, we especially love footballs, 4th down-and-10 situations, and warm hot dogs in our mouths on crisp fall nights. We don’t like counting out 8 laps for the 2-mile event. We’ve been accustomed to call anything where little skinny people flail for more than a minute around a dusty track “faggoty.” Real men thump their chests like apes, take knees at the edges of 100-yard fields of glory, and motivate men while looking like Phil Cowher. “Faggots” wear short shorts, expose their rib cages, and run a lot for no real real reason.

You know Costas himself reminded us fudge chewers last night that the world fastest human is a Jamaican man named Bolt. I corrected him from my angry perch, but he didn’t hear me. I said screamed (with pieces of brown sugar lard dripping on the floor) something like “He is the world’s fastest accelerator at 100 meters! He is not the world’s fastest sustained runner at 5000, 10,000, or 42,195M! Is Bolt the world’s most efficient fat converter? HE IS NOT!” Ah damn them all–injustice will always sit on us American distance runners like the weight of a suit of Gothic plate armor.
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Two other great and terrible American broadcasting moments from last night:

1. Costas joking about the Central African Republic when it was time for their one athlete to march on. It struck me as somewhat arrogant. He chortled–reminding us Americans (ourselves completely ignorant about geography) that it is a republic in central Africa. I wanted to say, “And the United States are a bunch of states that are united–hardee-fucking-har!”

2. The infamous Sesame Street moment: Some China expert telling me and the 100 million tear-dripping Cracker Barrel grandmas about the Chinese belief in Chi: describing it thusly “It’s a force that runs through everything–including me and you!”

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 9th, 2008 at 9:21 pm and is filed under Running. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.