The Olympics

What's on my mind today is for once not politics. It's the Olympics. To me, it's obvious that the Olympics have far too many sports. The cost of building venues and hosting all those events has become prohibitive, to the extent where every host city loses a ton of money. Also, the addition of sports decreases the purity of the Games by introducing inane competitions which have little popular appeal and are not contested widely at a high level. For example, a sport like skeleton, which was new at the Salt Lake games, is inaccessible to all but the few people who both give a shit about being good at it and have the money to travel to a training site. There's certainly no luge/bobsled/skeleton ramp in Minneapolis. So basically, you have to be able to get to a former Olympic site in order to train for the event. Plus, nobody cares. Talk about watered down competition. Thus, we should reevaluate all the Olympic sports.

1) All Olympic sports should be the highest level of competition in the world. The Olympic gold medal is for the best in the world. The Olympics should not accept being relegated to an afterthought in any sport. They took a good step in this direction by getting rid of baseball for 2012. However, I also believe that soccer, basketball, tennis, road biking, and hockey all have to go.

2) Any sport with subjective decision of the winners is gone. Since when does citius altius fortius means that a panel a fat Eastern Europeans decides who gets to win? The judging issues in figure skating and gymnastics have pretty much demonstrated that these sports are ridiculous. If you want to see teenage drama, watch the OC.

3) NO NEW SPORTS! They've added mountain biking to the Olympics, and they're adding BMX. It's pretty established fact that with a little training, most road bikers would kill the mountain bikers in mountain biking. So they've got to stop creating sports just so more people can participate and get medals. All these venues cost major cash, and all the new sports take away from the purity of the Olympics.

So there you have it. Get rid of a bunch of sports, and the Olympics would be a lot more compelling. As it is, it's mostly a bunch of garbage, with some track and weightlifting mixed in.