Choosing One's Response

 A few days ago, near the start of he '26 Winter Olympics, I was dismayed to hear on the news about Trump going on a "you're a loser" angry rant against an athlete who simply answered a politically-oriented question.  This president always has an open line to contact me and discuss anything he wants, and if the highly improbable were to happen and someone shoved a mike and camera before me with a highly charged question, that's how i'd reply.  You see, I can't always control what happens to me, but more likely I have the option of being able to choose how to respond. And it's within my chosen responses that I have the opportunity for personal growth, and perhaps being able to take a positive step to help this sadly progressively degrading world we live in...

Quote of the Week...from Simone Biles

If you ever have a mistake, you try to just kind of forget about it because if you carry that with you for the rest of the routine, then the rest of your routine might not go as planned.  So you just kind of shake it off, and you continue your routine like you didn't fall.                              ---Simone Biles

Yesterday I wrote about the Paris Olympics and that I tended to avoid sports like gymnastics in which judges subjectively awarded scores to the competitors.  One exception: when American Simone Biles competed for the all-around women's gold medal.  During the whole time the NBC commentators would point out this mistake or that one, as if they themselves could even perform on the same floor as this group of the world's best.  Biles for her part made some "mistakes" but as the above quote of hers points out, you just have to shake it off and keep performing as if nothing happened.  That, along with other quotes of hers pointing to how simply having fun doing something challenging can massively enhance your life as well as performance, impressed me about her wisdom, far beyond her age.  Yes, I got a little tired of all the Google Gemini and pharmaceutical commercials, but that doesn't detract from my appreciation of Simone Biles...

About the Recent Paris Summer Olympics

Well, the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics have come and gone, and they pretty much went the way I expected.  Fortunately, extraneous political and terrorist activity didn't cloud the games although the argument can be legitimately made that with the exclusion of Russia (and Belarus) for their invasion of Ukraine, there was a huge gap in them with so many missing premier athletes.  For this alone, I thought that NBC, the network covering it all, was a bit silly with their overemphasis on national medal tallies and the "competition" between the USA and China for most gold medals.  Don't get me wrong: I tend to root for the "home team" but I don't get carried away with nationalism, either.  I think the shining moment, though, for me was in the men's track 1,500 meter final when, after all the preliminary drama about the two favorites (from Norway and Britain) having a bitter rivalry between them, the American slipped in there at the very end and won it...ha-ha-ha!  As I wrote before the Olympics, I tended to follow objectively measurable individual sports, enjoying the track and field, biking and swimming competitions the most and generally avoiding diving, gymnastics and team sports.  I dug the golf, although for some reason I veered away from the tennis and table tennis...well, the latter was obvious since I had trouble following the lightning-fast motion of the ball across the table.  I'm glad it's over...especially all those commercials featuring star American athletes.  I'm more in tune with participatory athletics over the elite elements of various sports, but often I can learn a lot about proper form from watching the best in the business...and for better or worse it's definitely a business these days....

About the Summer Olympics and How I See the Various Sports

The Summer Olympics will be beginning in Paris, France on July 26, lasting into the first couple of weeks in August.  I've watched some of the American qualifying trials in various sports, and have found that they can be divided in three different ways.  First of all, there are the sports that are objectively scored...races of all sorts like swimming, running and walking get specific finishing times that rank the contestants.  Others like jumping and throwing get minutely-measured distances to their credit.  Then there are the events that, like America's Got Talent, require a panel of judges to deliver the scores subjectively...gymnastics, diving, and synchronized swimming belong to this group.  Since many of the first type have special limiting rules requiring judges at them (walking and special swim-stroke races), we see a mixture of the two types there.  The second way they are divided is into individual and team events.  Sports like soccer, water polo, field hockey, basketball and baseball all are heavily dependent on that subjective judging element yet ultimately come down to which side has the most goals or runs.  The third way the Olympic events are divided is a bit more subtle, but in my opinion just as important.  Some events have a widespread following and participation aspect to them: soccer, basketball, running, and jumping are in this group.  Others, like gymnastics, swimming, race-walking, water polo, and golf...to mention just a few...are either not very popular among the masses, are relatively exclusive to more privileged elements of society, or require fashioned settings not available in many places.  To get that gold medal can have different meanings based on whether the winner was raised in a "privileged" sport without much competition, or maybe the sport is so unknown and unpracticed that this limited the degree of competition as well.  But my big problem in all this is that first division, between subjectively and objectively-scored sports.  In the trials I tended to avoid sports like diving and gymnastics for this very reason.  I'll probably follow whatever happens to be on TV at the time when the Games begin, but my clear preference will be for the sports that (1) are objectively scored, (2) are individual in nature, and (3) have been popular with widespread availability.  And oh, by the way, I'm no flag-waver...I'm eschewing nationalism although if the US wins, that's cool, too..

Olympic Swimming Trials and Pool Training Access

I was watching the Olympic qualifying trials the past few days on NBC, primarily in swimming and running.  I couldn't get past the notion that with the former, the great athletes in these events were privileged to have easy access to pools to train in.  When I went to high school, you could tell that the good swimmers also had that kind of access to pools, and I didn't.  Now I'm 67 and with a gym membership touting its pool to swim laps in, and I have pretty much given up on the idea of ever having access to it with it being so crowded, even late in the evening.  Yet on a personal level I have to take responsibility for making time to get to a pool, whether it is waiting for long stretches at that gym or finding a way to use one of my two city pools when they happen to be open.  I'm still entertaining the notion of drastically improving my swimming form in the various standard strokes and integrating it all with my running as I age...but that pool access is still an obstacle, something that does not exist with my running or walking.  Of course, I'm talking training to a much more modest level than those championship swimmers, and they also merit their due respect for working hard and rising above their more limited and privileged group of competitors...