The Olympics
Watching the Olympics could be one of the more depressing exercises for me. Two of the American skaters last night were under the age of seventeen. As I watched a sixteen-year-old girl land a difficult combination trick, and the crowd cheered, I wondered what I've been doing with my life. There I was, sitting on the couch, going to school every day. If I'd made a few different decisions, I could have been the one there, triple toe looping and waving and "going for the gold." But then I thought about the kind of decisions I would have made:
1. Several hour practices every day.
2. Training from an age before I could spell "shoe."
3. Spending a great deal of money on a coach and gear.
4. Watching what I eat.
And I came to the conclusion that not being in the Olympics doesn't make me a slacker, it just keeps me from being at a certain level of overachieving. I started skating at the same time many of the Olympic skaters do, but I was more of a jack-of-all-trades, master of none type of girl at that age, sampling, and I didn't want to put in the time to be ridiculously good at anything. The problem with it, also, is that in terms of peak career years, you're almost dead by the time you're twenty-five, when I plan to be just beginning my career. Now, I realize that there are some sports where people are going to the games well past the age of twenty-five, but most of those are sports people can die very easily in, such as skeleton, luge, bobsledding, and ski jumping. I'd like being famous, but I like being alive and without a crippling injury more.
Having comforted myself, I felt no guilt about sitting down, grabbing a bag of Sun Chips, and munching on them while people performed great feats of athletic skill. The great contrast between myself and the flying, skating, jumping people on television made me gleeful. It was rather gratifying, and I was liberated, no longer plagued by the nagging questions of why I was such a slacker and what the hell was I doing with me life, that I wasn't an Olympic athlete. I have gone through a vicious cycle during these Olympics, however, where I move from satisfied to upset about not being a world-class athlete. I was able to rest easy during figure skating, until a new thought came to me (I'm beginning to think that thinking is a bit of a curse): well, there has to be at least one sport in the Olympics that I could do. I mulled over it while watching Snowboard Cross, the only coma-inducing sport in the winter games. I ran through a list of sports in my head, increasingly discouraged, until it struck me:
If I start curling now, perhaps by 2010...
1. Several hour practices every day.
2. Training from an age before I could spell "shoe."
3. Spending a great deal of money on a coach and gear.
4. Watching what I eat.
And I came to the conclusion that not being in the Olympics doesn't make me a slacker, it just keeps me from being at a certain level of overachieving. I started skating at the same time many of the Olympic skaters do, but I was more of a jack-of-all-trades, master of none type of girl at that age, sampling, and I didn't want to put in the time to be ridiculously good at anything. The problem with it, also, is that in terms of peak career years, you're almost dead by the time you're twenty-five, when I plan to be just beginning my career. Now, I realize that there are some sports where people are going to the games well past the age of twenty-five, but most of those are sports people can die very easily in, such as skeleton, luge, bobsledding, and ski jumping. I'd like being famous, but I like being alive and without a crippling injury more.
Having comforted myself, I felt no guilt about sitting down, grabbing a bag of Sun Chips, and munching on them while people performed great feats of athletic skill. The great contrast between myself and the flying, skating, jumping people on television made me gleeful. It was rather gratifying, and I was liberated, no longer plagued by the nagging questions of why I was such a slacker and what the hell was I doing with me life, that I wasn't an Olympic athlete. I have gone through a vicious cycle during these Olympics, however, where I move from satisfied to upset about not being a world-class athlete. I was able to rest easy during figure skating, until a new thought came to me (I'm beginning to think that thinking is a bit of a curse): well, there has to be at least one sport in the Olympics that I could do. I mulled over it while watching Snowboard Cross, the only coma-inducing sport in the winter games. I ran through a list of sports in my head, increasingly discouraged, until it struck me:
If I start curling now, perhaps by 2010...
posted by Meredith at 6:56 AM
1 Comments:
Every one of my friends is obsessed with the skating, and rightly so. Skating disciplines are by far the most interesting sports in the Winter Olympics.
I can't tell the difference between any of the jumps (apart from double, triple, quad designations, but even then it sometimes gets hazy). The toe is when they hack the toe of the skate into the ice in order to take off, right (duh)? But then what's the toe loop? And don't they always strike the ice in some way before jumping? What's the difference? And perhaps far more importantly, why does it make a difference?
Hence, the top six performances yesterday all looked pretty much identical to me, so I don't get how there could be such a huge score difference between, say, Cohen and Meissner.
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