Gymnastics part 2

Now that I’ve given you a quick bit of historical background on gymnastics, I have to explain our own family’s participation in this august and ancient sport. 

When you go to watch a gymnastics meet, you get bad seats.  It doesn’t matter whether you go early, or late, or whatever, you will always get bad seats.  There are no good seats. 

This is different from, say, baseball, which is very clearly a spectator sport.  The whole game of baseball is designed to lull you into a sense of relaxed good cheer, with all of the boring time between innings, and the fact that even when all the players are actually out there, they aren’t doing anything, ever.  They are just standing around, and every two minutes or so, the guy on the little tiny mountain will throw the ball, and nobody else will move, except the guy in the black outfit, and all he does is say a word.  Then, the ball goes back to the guy on the mountain, and you wait two more minutes for the guy on the mountain to throw the ball again.  This is all that happens for hours, and then you go home.  Baseball is designed so that you just sit there and relax.  The field where they play is aesthetically pleasing, and you just sit there and watch nothing, and perhaps you drink a beverage that is designed to slow your heart rate, and when you go home, your blood pressure is lower, and you’ve eaten some comfort food, and you feel better . . . it’s just like visiting your therapist, except you don’t have to talk about your feelings or your childhood. 

Basketball and football are just the opposite; there is lots and lots going on, all the time.  When you leave a basketball/football game you feel slightly worn out from trying to keep up with all the action.  Watching live golf is more like baseball . . . pretty fields, nothing ever happening with the added benefit that the ball might kill you (this is also true in baseball).  Nascar is boring and you will suffer hearing loss and a car wreck might kill you.  Soccer is a mix of baseball and basketball; there’s lots of action, but it’s boring action, and the fans might kill you.  Tennis is mostly boring, except that it is culturally important to be quiet while watching a tennis game, so that you might get to hear the players curse.  This is not good for your soul.  

So . . . watching sports is a mix of deadly, boring, exhausting, and morally decadent.  Therefore, we have recently invented new sports, and called them extreme.  The whole point of extreme sports is  to have a sport where spectators are relatively safe, but the participants are the ones who might die.  One of these extreme sports involves motorcycles.  

Motorcycles are terrifying machines in and of themselves.  They have only half of the requisite number of wheels, and they have an engine that you place between your legs while you ride your motorcycle.  Just not hurting yourself at all should be cause for celebration whilst riding a motorcycle.  Other extreme sports involve boats, snowmobiles, hang gliders, and chain saws.

Back to gymnastics.  Gymnastics are not like watching other sports.  Recall; baseball=boring, basketball=tiring, golf=death.  All of these are great ways to enjoy an afternoon.  But gymnastics tries to mix two opposing emotions.  Most of the time, gymnastics is boring.  There are hundreds of girls, all doing the same routines, one after another.  So you get to see, say, 1,349 little girls all do the exact same series of moves on the bar, one after another.  This is boring.  However, suddenly, your own daughter is standing there, and then she is on the bar, and the boring is replaced by abject, stultifying terror. 

Your heart is pounding, almost painfully, and you are gripping your legs so hard that you are leaving bruises.  You realize that if she falls off that bar in the wrong way, she could break any variety of bones, including her neck.  Your daughter, the one that sometimes trips over air, is spinning around that little bar.  You realize, suddenly, that she is right now doing something on that bar that you could not do, not even if somebody offered you a BMW.  She goes around and around, and then she stops, and goes around a couple more times, and then she sort of flies in the air, and she lands on her feet. 

The terror subsides, but only for awhile, only while the 1,349 other little girls do their routines.  They all look safe and under control, and you realize that the adults are standing there, about 2 feet away,  there’s nothing to worry about, nothing at all.   Then, she is doing her balance beam routine, and you aren’t breathing again.  That beam is FOUR FEET IN THE AIR!  If she falls, she will undoubtedly break some bones, perhaps her neck.  Then she jumps lightly off, and the terror subsides, but it comes twice more, for the vault and the floor exercise.

We’ve been to two gymnastics meets.  Both times, Anna competed against three other girls.  The first time, Anna scored poorly–she came in last in everything, except the beam, where she came in third.  The terror was awful, and was mixed with disappointment and sadness.  The second time, Anna scored well–two firsts, a second, and a fourth.  She got first overall.   The pride at her success did not ameliorate the terror, not at all. 

These two gymnastics meets lasted about 3-4 hours apiece, and it was 3-4 hours of boredom, punctuated by 4 separate minutes of absolute, hideous, overwhelming terror.

And, from watching the olympics, I know that the terror does not get better.  I’ve watched the olympics.  They always show the parents of those little pixie girls, and I can see it on their faces, faces that have aged 30 years in the single decade that their daughter has been doing this thing.

How I wished she got into something that doesn’t bring so much terror, something like skydiving, or the Marines.

Anyway, Happy Christmas, and may your children not fill you with terror.

gymnastics

Most Americans think about gymnastics about once every 4 years, because of the summer olympics.  During the summer olympics, we all gather around to watch Amateur American Athletes (also known as AARP) be feel-good ambassadors to the rest of the countries by winning more medals than any of them. 

There are lots of different ways to compete in the olympics.  There is field and track, and there is soccer.  There is basketball, and  baseball, and golf, and tennis.   There are a variety of unarmed combat events, such as wrestling, Judo, Sumo, boxing, kickboxing, shadowboxing, MMA, WWF, and KICKBOOTY.  There is shooting, curling, swimming, diving, snorkeling, weightlifting, there is rowing, racing, polo, bicycle riding, eating, and belching.  However, if you watch on TV, you will never get to watch any of these fascinating and unique sporting events, because about 85% of the olympic coverage is focused on 16-year-old girls who are all 4 feet tall and due to genetic rarities (and, in the case of Germany and China, male hormone therapy) can do flips and the splits while they dance around to music.

You have never seen many of the events that I am discussing, and some of you did not even know that weight-lifting and swimming were a part of the olympics.  You will never get to see them, I am sorry, because you will be shown a steady diet of the 16-year-old pixie girls dancing and doing their flips. 

Would you like to watch some wrestling?  Some belching, or rowing?  TOUGH BEANS, LOSER!  WATCH SOME GYMNASTICS INSTEAD!

As you can see, I am less than sanguine about the whole olympics=pixie flipping dancing-girls situation. 

Back in the olden days, olympics competitors were all male, and they actually didn’t wear clothes while they competed, and the only two things the naked males did were race and wrestle.  However, NBC did a poll on this issue, and determined that most people did not want to watch naked males fighting or running, and so they branched out: naked males shooting bows and arrows, naked males ice skating, naked males playing volleyball, but ratings continued to be flat.  So, NBC made the males start wearing clothes in 1977, and then, in the 1983 olympics, NBC had females (clothed) competing for the first time. 

However, the females were unable to compete with the males in most of the events.  In weightlifting, the women would hoist 200 pounds over their head, and then the males (back then steroids were a regular aspect of the olympics) would come out and hoist Peterbilts over their heads, and so the women were not winning any medals.  Ratings remained flat.  Guys wanted to watch nascar, and women did not want to watch other women lose.  Then came feminism, and in 1989, Gloria Steinem burned a bust of Arnold Schwarzenegger using her bra as kindling on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.  Then came Title 9, which is a law that says that women, if they can’t compete with men, should have the option to just make up their own stupid sports, where men won’t be able to compete at all.

Thus, in 1991, gymnastics were debuted in the Pyongyang Olympics, and we’ve never looked back.  American women, who don’t care one tiny bit about real sports like football, will all tune in en mass, 190 million strong, to the olympics while the pixie flipping dancing is happening, and then, if the announcers even mention field hockey, all 190 million will change channels instantly.  Of course, NBC knows when you’re watching their channel, because they have little devices in your TVs, so they give the women what they want.  Men can’t keep up with the tidal wave of estrogen, so they just give up and switch back to nascar. 

Sometimes a clear perspective, complete with accurate facts, can give us a sense of how to interpret the world around us, which is why I gave you an abbreviated historical backdrop to bring you to where we are today, which is the current American idea that the olympics=gymnastics, and gymnastics=pixie girls dancing and flipping to music, and I think we can blame Gloria Steinem.

You might feel that I am exagerating, but I am not.  Last time the olympics were on, I watched for a while, and all I saw was pixie girls dancing and flipping to mucus.  I mean music. 

I wanted Anna to play a sport that involved, at minimum, some sort of ball.  Shoot, I would have bought her a Peterbilt, if she’d have shown any interest in weightlifting . . . get her started young, and she’d have been fine.

What does Ashlei do?  She waits until I am out of the house, and then she goes sneaking off to some gymnastics facility, and signs both girls up.

Immediately, before the first class, it was obvious that Abbey is not genetically wired for gymnastics.  Even I could see this.  However, after only a couple of weeks, the head of the gymnastics facility came up to Ashlei and told her that they wanted to put Anna in an advanced class.  The advanced class, of course, costs more money.  Everything about gymnastics costs money.  And takes time, lots of time.

Months passed.

Now, we go to meets, which will be the topic of my next blog, sometime later this week.  Probably Friday.