Yeah, you know it.  I’m talking about the Olympics, that Grecian spectacle of the best “amateur sports talent” the world has to offer.  I could provide another cogent and timely expose about the Olympics in general, but you already know I’m going to focus on the ultimate in Olympic swindles:  the Winter Games.

You already know of my disdain for the corrupt world of spectator sports in general from chess to the ultimate fixer sport: NBA basketball, so I’m not going over that again.  There are numerous posts in the archive that any pinhead can see about the sorry state of spectator sports, so go there for the lowdown and my on-target comments on that life-entertainment waster.

Let’s jump right into the ultimate sports Ponzi scheme.  If you hadn’t already figured it out the Winter Olympics is merely an inferior spin-off of the Summer Olympics.  When the Olympics were brought back from their justly deserved grave there were only Summer games.  This actually made some kind of sense since Greece, the site of the real historical Olympics, was a nice summery place.  They didn’t even know anything about snow shoeing, much less ice dancing, in Greece.  So some get rich media con men realized that  playing childrens games only in the summer meant that only fair weather “sports” were going to be featured.  “Hey, hows about we make some more money off the suckers by staging a winter event, then we can rake in a bunch more dough in places like Norway and Canada where the yokels are too stupid to know they could get a nice condo down South and avoid the bad climate?”  Well, anyone with only half a brain like you could see that this was going to catch on with the masses like a bottle of Jack Daniels at an AA meeting.

Instead of having the only legitimate full-contact scoring sport possible for the Winter Olympics, ice hockey, the paddock had to be filled with such pseudo sports as curling, biathalon, speed skating, figure skating, cross country skiing, and similar non-events.  The only thing close to a sport other than hockey were the so-called Alpine events which all basically consisted of seeing who could fall down a mountain the fastest.  Again, I think you can see why these events would appeal to people who only see the sun for half the year.  The incredible thing is these non-events are pandered to a global community population many of whom live in tropical or sub-tropical zones where they are still wildly popular to watch.

Not to be outdone in the con game, some wise fixer figured that having both the summer and Winter Olympics in the same 12 months was a marketing snafu so they brilliantly alternated the summer and winter games to be every other year.  Now the suckers would have the five rings of confidence tricksters in front of them all the time instead of just once every four years.

This year’s Wintercon is in the former Soviet republic of Russia.  In the Wikipedia entry for Sochi it is listed as not only claiming to be the longest (?) city in the world but “was primarily Muslim before 1864” but now is “primarily Christian.”  I wonder what hallowed event in 1864 caused all those conversions?  We are all hopeful that there are not some hunkered down Chechens in Sochi province thinking about 1864 intending to reenact the 1972 tragedy at the Munich summer games.  Anyway, don’t let the Chechens compete in the biathlon and everything will be all right.

Official Sochi Olympics Welcoming Committee

Now that we have established Sochi as the Eastern bastion of peaceful ethnic bliss that every Olympic host city should be, we can get down to the real nitty-gritty of why this is the worst possible way you can spend your entertainment time this winter:  boring and pre-staged.  The fact that some of my favorite shows are going to be preempted for this sham is blasphemy and you know the other networks are just going to peg reruns and endless cycles of The Green Lantern until this ratings fiasco is over.

One of the biggest problems the winter games has is a dearth of scoring sports.  Other than ice hockey it is really only curling and we already know that any sport where you can smoke a cigarette while playing it is going to be duller than dishwater.  Really if you get right down to it you know this north of the border version of shuffleboard has gotta be sad when the hottest player is going to be known as “The Janitor.”  I don’t care if there are curling clubs all over Canada.  There are rats all over Calcutta and we don’t have rat bashing as an Olympic sport.  I rest my case.

Speed skating dull.  Ice dancing, not a sport.  Figure skating, fixed and also not a real scoring sport.  All downhill sports, dull except maybe for ski jumping.  Ski jumping would actually be better if they put some of those tire slashers that they use to catch criminals down the slope.  You would have to get over these clean to even place.  Adds that Evel Knievel factor that would class up the “sport.”  Bob sled and luge, again falling down a hill and too few spectacular crashes.  X-sports, mainly to attract children and winter-bored skateboarders.   All shooting sports, no comment except to say that live ammunition assassins along the course could make this worthwhile TV fare, even more exciting with a live audience along the way.  Cross country skiing, give me a break!

So now you know the sad truth about another of the bread and circuses the suckered masses are going to sit down to instead of reading a book or watching the NCIS marathons on the USA cable network.  Talk about wasting your life!