The Olympics don't care for me, so I don't care for them

I see that Canada is showing its usual prowess at the Olympics. Zero medals.

I don’t truly care.

On the other hand, we all remember that moment of brief glory back at the Seoul Olympics when sprinter Ben Johnson won us the gold. Why, he was a ‘Canadian Hero.’ Then it turned out our hero was doped to the pecs. Overnight the Canadian hero became that Jamaican guy.

Yeah, as if all other competitors were innocent. Johnson was just dumb enough to get caught.

But, again, I didn’t really care.

I didn’t care because the Olympics mean diddly to me.

I won’t go into all the reasons for my Olympics antagonism, but one of the important ones goes back to childhood trauma. Doesn’t everything?

You see, as a kid, I was not exactly known for athletic prowess. If truth be known, I was always the ‘second last’ kid picked when we were choosing up sides for anything involving a team effort. God, how I hated those moments. I wasn’t the last picked, because there was always some poor kid who was the true bottom of the barrel.

What I came to realize from those moments – and they really hurt, believe me – was that kids can be remarkably thoughtless, and that they had handy allies in those pedagogical scum of the earth creatures, PE teachers. I came to loathe school jock teachers, coaches, and their ilk with an abiding passion. I hated them because they humiliated kids and were too stupid to even ‘get it.’

I mean, I was otherwise an OK kid. I was fairly popular, had lots of friends, did well in my other stuff and generally played the ‘larger’ game in that detestable institution known as the public school. Yet, when it came to choosing teams, even my so-called friends would turn against me when the picking of players came about. What was that all about?

I don’t know why I wasn’t very athletic. I mean, I wasn’t an awkward shape, and I didn’t stumble over my feet, but when it came especially to team sports, I just regularly tanked. I couldn’t catch a ball to save my life, for example. I did OK in individual areas of prowess, like track, for example. I was a decent runner and even got a few ribbons. I was also a decent swimmer, and I could even ice-skate with prowess. But, throw hockey into that mix, and I was a goner.

I have concluded that the reason I was never much good at sports was I didn’t ‘get’ sports. I mean, sports consists of ‘games’. Games are playtime, they’re not serious. Games are fooling around and not getting one with life and matters of import. The other part I didn’t understand was why people took playtime pursuits so seriously. Games are supposed to be fun, in my esteem, because they are of no value whatsoever other than that.

Yet, look at how seriously society takes them. Look at what we pay boneheaded so-called professional athletes. Look at the reality that deems a goddamn high school coach as being a more significant person in a school than a math or English teacher. In reality, he is so much less important that it boggles the mind.

So, that’s why I don’t give a rat’s-ass for the Olympics. The Olympics committees are a collection of superannuated high school jocks given licence to glean huge amounts of public and corporate money for the sake of silly games. Games that don't even pay lip-service to any form of international morality which is why the games have been accorded to some pretty awful totalitarian regimes, such as Berlin in 1936, Soviet Moscow later, and currently Beijing.

And I primarily don’t give a rat’s-ass because I never got picked, so why should I play along now?

If you think I’m being childish and mean-spirited about this, that’s OK. Anyway, it’s my blog.