I have long considered Sport, like dairylea and Queen, to be both boring and marginally unpleasant. However, I have steadily come to realise that maybe my judgement was too harsh…maybe. Of course, the idea of people being paid vast quantities of money for effectively playing games does grind somewhat with my sense of what is good in the world, but if people want to pay them for it then you have to hand it to the crafty buggers.
I enjoyed the bits of the olympics I saw immensely! I didn’t watch all of it, I didn’t even watch a decent percentage (I’m not a crazy person). Most of what I saw was in the background while I did other, much more important things. Like reading webcomics. But that’s not to say that I wasn’t impressed by the swimmers, cyclists, gymnasts, weightlifters and pentathletes I saw, to whom the best comparison I can make are Superheroes. Visually. Batman could do all those things and more, but hey, he’s not real, and his build’s like that guy on the parallel bars. The novelty wore off by the time I reached the Paralympics, which is a real shame, because I’ve only heard good things about the amazing feats the Paralympians pulled off. It brought up questions about the true meanings of words like “disabled” because people in wheelchairs often kicked more arse than anyone else. And George Osborne got booed (well, if you have the name, face and behaviour of spiderman villain….), which if you look up on youtube, is hilarious.
I also follow the cycling, which, regardless of what anyone else wants to say, is the most brutal sport in the world which isn’t illegal somewhere. I’ve seen a man fall down a mountain to land with barbed wire between his legs, and get back on his bike. I’ve seen a pile up of 20 people, each going at 30mph, which broke a guy’s collarbone. He finished the race. The races last all day! Across hundreds of miles! It makes a footballer’s grazed knee and one and a half hours look pathetic (Frankly, so does playing football when you’re 10, where the rules consist broadly of “no hand-balls” and “no weaponry”). It’s also fortunate, because it’s a sport the UK is good at.
Unlike…football. That massive corporate preoccupation of this country which is only rendered more inexplicable by just how bad we are at it. We haven’t won the World Cup since 1966. That was when my Dad was born. Seriously? We’re not getting any better! Why would you watch some overpaid children kick a ball around a massive field for nearly 2 hours when you know we will lose?! But hey, I play video games, and blog, so I suppose I can’t talk about futility (but FIFA? What the fuck!?)
igottheconch 