The Olympics more than playing games?

 Where Will You Be When the Flame Goes  Dark?

Or Do We Have the Courage to Keep it glowing?

So we are nearing the closing ceremony of the 2024 summer Olympics from Paris…well mostly the surfing couldn’t be staged  in the foreground of that erector set otherwise known as the Eiffel Tower.  As always there have been some extraordinary achievements like the swimming of Katie Ledecky and the tumbling of the U.S. women gymnasts.  In a couple days this blog will expand on some of this, however for now let’s take a “big picture” look at the games and ponder on what these humans and the things they do bring into our awareness if only for a couple weeks every four years.  

Maybe the first thing to note about the Olympics is that there were a couple of “new” events as is often the case.  It is unfortunate that the IOC did not include javelin catching again this time around.  It is one thing to throw a cannon ball and use a fiberglass stick to leap high enough to get a frisbee off your two story house.  It would be something altogether more dramatic to watch guys in tights not only throwing the spears but also catching them and throwing them to each other.  Maybe we’d learn that throwing weapons around at each other doesn’t add much to bringing the people of the earth together. It is difficult not to offer  the question of what would war look like if throwing these heavy metal balls (called shot puts?) was the only weaponry allowed when armed combat couldn’t be avoided?   It should be noted, however, that live pigeon shooting (1900 Olympics) was also left off the medal menu so hope grows slowly.  

Both break-dancing and ballroom dancing were events and while these activities are an art form and take athletic skills, it would seem judging a Waltz and somebody throwing down a sheet of cardboard and cranking up a boombox might offer a challenge.  Perhaps like the gymnastic all around competition maybe these dancing events along with synchronized swimming could be combined? In fact, perhaps it might be time to really push the global envelope and do away with “judged” events altogether.  It would seem that the world is pretty much saturated with people willing to judge each other even when we might lack the internal  and external skills we are observing so that we can compare people we don’t know.  

Determining the winner in many of the events is far easier and yet somewhat more brutal.  Take for instance, hundreds of sprinters trained collectively hundreds of years and then less than ten of them knelt in the starting blocks and bolted out with blazing speed.  Less than 10 seconds later one of the racers broke the tape 5 one thousandths  of a second faster than the rest.  So what if you finished second?  Could we all possibly finally get the message that 

COMPARISON IS THE THIEF  OF JOY?

Anyway, since the games last two weeks it seems appropriate that this blog give it at least two entries and that means we’ll pass the baton  on for now.  Thanks for navigating the hurdles  on this topic so far.