gold, silver, and bronze, oh my!
Is it just me or does the fact that Michael Phelps might win 8 gold medals sort of take away from the quality of that prized trophy? I mean imagine you are Abhinav Bindra, India’s first gold-medal winner. The entire country is flipping out over you:
Indian television news channels were giddy in their coverage, showing footage of Bindra receiving his medal and the raising of the Indian flag on a near continuous loop, interrupted only by interviews with his parents from their home in northern India
Only for Phelps to come around and say, “hey Abhinav, congrats and all, but I already have fourteen fucking gold medals.” Swimming is a particular culprit in this sense. Wikipedia tells me that there are 34 medals awarded to swimmers, apparently up from 28 in the 1968 Mexico City games. Cracked.com’s Chris Bucholz says it best:
Also, what the fuck is up with the ridiculous number of swimming events? Do we really need all these strokes? Just to recap, there’s the fast way to swim, and three slow ways. Why do they all get a dozen medaled events each? There aren’t separate medals for throwing javelins with your off-hand or bobsledding while half in the bag, so why the swimmers get hundreds of extra medals for swimming slowly is beyond me. Imagine the 100 meter sprint, only every competitor had to use a different funny walk from that old Monty Python sketch, and the whole thing is set to banjo music. That’s basically what the 100m butterfly looks like to me.
In fact, the total number of events has nearly doubled from 172 in Mexico City to 302 in Beijing. Some of the events that have been added since then are baseball, badminton, synchronized diving, 11 new cycling events, 9 new canoeing events, 14 different medals for Judo, 8 for taekwondo, and a bunch more I’m not going to bother to look up. A lot of these events have good reasons for coming to be, such as inclusion of women in previously men-only competitions (as in cycling), or inclusion of traditionally non-Western sports (as in taekwondo or judo).
But really, are we just getting far too specialized? Imagine the existence of a 100m butterfly specialist:
“Hey man, you’re a swimmer huh? So you wanna go to the pool with my family and me?”
“Ok, sure.”
– At the pool –
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Butterfly, man. It’s my event, ya know.”
“Oh… why do you keep turning around?”
“Gotta swim 50m then turn around. Olympic size pool, ya know. Coach says if I ever swim more or less than 50m I might lose my bearings.”
“Ok well we’re gonna go play with the floaty-noodles. You want in?”
“Nah I gotta stick to this.”
Anyway, maybe it’s my own ignorance, but when the same person wins 8 different medals, it might be an indication that the events are getting a bit redundant.
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