Published: August 20, 2008 12:11 am            

Beijing Olympics promote insomnia

I hate the Olympics.

No, really I love the Olympics, I just hate the fact I have lost so much sleep staying up to watch.

Keeping up with Michael Phelps’ quest for eight gold medals was worse for my slumbers than knocking back a double espresso just before bed.

Phelps, the most decorated Olympic athlete in history, is remarkable and his feat likely will never be repeated. Once he wins two or three more gold medals in London in 2012, he’ll establish a record that probably won’t ever be broken.

The gangly kid from Baltimore, who will be on the cover of magazines and cereal boxes, as well as on every television channel short of the Jewelry Network for the foreseeable future, is a star of epic proportions.

Since he clinched his eighth gold medal and moved past Mark Spitz to become the top winner in any single Olympics, there has been great debate about his place in the pantheon of the greatest Olympic athletes in history. Some pundits claim he is not worthy of the title of best Olympian ever. To that I say Phelps won eight gold medals in one Olympics, nobody else has ever done that. Enough said.

This Olympics has been notable for a number of other things, besides Phelps’ domination of his sport. Gymnastics, for one. The governing body for international gymnastics has apparently decided to enforce only some of its rules and not others. It stuck Nastya Liukin with the silver medal thanks to some strange tie-breaking system after the American gymnast tied China’s He Kexin Monday on the uneven parallel bars. Other Olympic sports, like swimming and track, will award double medals in case of a tie. Not gymnastics, which stuck to its stupid rule rather than properly reward both gymnasts.

The gymnastics body chooses to ignore its own minimum age rule for participants. Gymnasts today are supposed to be 16 or older to qualify for the Olympics. The Chinese gymnasts, most of whom don’t look a day over 12, all have passports that certify them as 16. Of course they do.

At any rate, America is re-establishing its dominance in a sport invented here: basketball. The U.S. women were expected to breeze to gold, but the men were trying to erase memories of the disappointing bronze medal performance in Athens in 2004. This year’s U.S. men’s team is playing as a unit, rather than a group of individuals, not a Dream Team, but a team that dreams of Olympic gold.

OK, so we’ll just have to beat them in something else, like beach volleyball. It’s a great sport, it’s fun, it’s fast-paced and it features bikinis, what else do you need?Of course, dominating a sport can be bad for America. The U.S. women’s softball team is trashing every team in its wake as it marches to another gold medal. But the sport has been removed from the Olympic program beginning in 2012, as has baseball. A stupid decision, to be sure, but not surprising given this nation’s decreased popularity with the rest of the world in recent years.

OK, so we’ll just have to beat them in something else, like beach volleyball. It’s a great sport, it’s fun, it’s fast-paced and it features bikinis, what else do you need?



Mullin is senior writer of the News & Eagle.