Re: the olympics

A quick listing:

Enjoyable events: women’s beach volleyball (hot!), team handball (weird!), synchronized diving (amazing!)

Less enjoyable events: men’s beach volleyball (what’s the appeal?), soccer (OMG how much soccer can you put on at once?!?), gymnastics – Romanian (painful to watch how bad they were).

It occurred to me that swimming is a strange group of events. It’s essentially a race, but the form of the race is carefully prescribed. You must swim using the breast stroke; you must swim using the crawl; you must swim the butterfly; you must swim the backstroke. You don’t see this in foot races. Those vary by distance, with team races and obstacles thrown in for variety. You can run any old way you want. There’s no one-legged hopping race… no running backwards race. I wonder why swimming differs? I have this vision of early swimming competitions being a magnet for gambling addicted wise-asses. "Welll… you did pretty well against our boy in the freestyle. Think you can beat him if… both your arms have to come out of the water at the same time on each stroke? How about if you swim on your back? C’mon, put your money where your mouth is…"