doodledee

Oh, I've got the fever bad. Olympic fever. Our povertybasic cable only gets the one Kare11 channel, but even with the limited primetime line-up I still manage to get sucked in most every night. And then on weekend mornings I fire-up the online stuff and stream things live for a while. (That site is amazingly well done, btw.) And then maybe during the workday I sneak into the breakroom and change the channel from Bloomberg to MSNBC and catch whatever happens to be on at the time. Last week we just up and moved the whole team in there for an afternoon. The collaboration (and innovation?) was arguably better, but yeah, I'm not sure we could get away with it every day. Guess there's only one way to find out.

Off the clock, I've been soaking up the gymnastics and the soccer and the rowing and some of the diving - but not that silly synchro stuff - and of course the cycling and then yesterday I got buried in like 2 and a half hours of marathon coverage and it was really really fun to watch and who knew, right? Right.

So now here's the part where I admit that the Phelps stuff didn't do much for me. I mean I most certainly watched it and I cheered and stuff, but other than the one insane hundredth of a second finish, none of the stuff was all that straight-up amazing to me. That's partly because he was supposed to win - and after like 2 days it became apparent that he was, in fact, better than everyone else ever in the history of the universe book it - and it's partly because he's all business and professional and "eat, sleep, swim" and all that. And there's this thing I figured out the other night: great champions make the stuff the do look both casual, easy and [most importantly?] stylish. Jordan, Gretzky, Ali? Exactly. Shaun White? Did I just say that? Anyway, Phelps certainly makes it look easy - and he's obviously a great champion - I'm just not sure he makes it look casual, and it's certainly not all that stylish. All that splashing and jumping and gasping for breath and you can't really see what's going on and then oh look, he's ahead by 2 body lengths. Again. Show his mom, play the anthem, same as it ever was.

Contrast that to Usain Bolt's victory the other night in the 100m. The 100 is all stare downs and head games and posturing and then the gun sounds and 10 guys run down a track faster than I can ride downhill on my bike. 30mph. Can robots even run that fast yet? I bet they can't. But Bolt can. And he dances before the race and he pulls up early and he throws out his hands and he thumps his chest and Tom Hammond yells "NEW WORLD RECORD, HOW EASY WAS THAT?!" and he's exactly right. Super easy. And so casual. And stylish. And I rewound it like 25 times. And I made the kids watch it the next morning. And Junior ran laps around the family room and insisted he was faster. He may have been right, but he has a long way to go in the style department. He gets that from his dad.

Another whole week to go. Nice.