Olympic Torture

Ok so these people are retired from their sporting "careers" before they hit the age of thirty and turn into pumpkins. I think this above all else marks the ridiculous nature of competitive sports. People sacrifice the vast majority of their you the training for competitions. Hours ever day are spent conditioning the body and practicing the sport. At the end of the day the pick the top three and give em a shiny metallic pendant once every four years. An athlete may get four five attempts ins the years they are between eligibility and retirement depending on when they were born and when the cut off day for their first competition is. (I just had a vision of a parent trying to conceive so that a child turns eligible a month before some future Olympic date). If a person never gets a medal (or podiums using the evil verb I've heard any number of times this year)he or she is forgotten or written off as a bad investment. All their dreams are over before thirty. Then what do they do.

Somehow I can not see a sports figure dreaming of some day being the voice you hear making snide comments while other compete. "Oh she missed that jump bill." "Wow, he has to be angry with himself over that Jane." And its many of these sports have much televised life outside of the Olympics. I'm not going to turn on ESPN and watch curling or luge any other time of the year.

So what I want to see is age brackets. I mean if we are going to do this kind of thing we might as well do it right. I want to know who the best 70 - 80 year old Nordic alpine is. Ok maybe the ski jumping is out and perhaps a upper limit in age around 65 (an age where athletic older people are still in very good health before all those terrible things that start hitting in the 70's, 80's or 90's without rhyme or reason). Sure a 30 year old may not be able to compete against a 16 year old in figure skating but I bet there are a ton of "retired" skaters who wouldn't mind seeing whose the best of the best and who let it all go after a few kids.

If we have to bring the whole world together for this monstrous sporting event why not keep em there a couple more weeks and do the job up right. Sure television ratings would plummet and it might actually ruin some kind of television based economies, but isn't it worth it to keep grandma luge from having to compete with 20 year olds.

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