When is the sports thing over?

[sabotabby]

Almost everyone has some reason to care about the Olympics. Whether it's the one event that they watch or some record-breaking something or that picture of the Black Power salute in 1968 or they just think some famous athlete is hot. Or they think the opening ceremony was cool/awful/loltastic. Even I am contributing by making this post. I can't avoid it, even with my Olympic content blocker (for some reason it also blocks references to disco).

Non-sports people are frequently apologetic when I bring up the fact that I feel like an alien during times like this. "I'm not interested, except...” It's like the Scumsucking Parasite Wedding, except in that case I at least had the rest of the extreme left on my side. But not so here. Even those who object to the totalitarian measures required for the Olympics to happen get misty-eyed over its ideals.

Fuck that.

Things that make me care about the Olympics:

• The purging of the poor and mentally ill from London.
• Surveillance cameras everywhere.
• The godawful branding (seriously hilarious).
• Rocket launchers on the roofs of apartment buildings.
• Banksy doing Banksy things.

Of course, even if these things were not an issue, I would still be apathetic at best, as the Olympics involves two things I could not possibly give a less of a shit about: sports and nationalism. It's not that I hate sports—I would be loathe to fall into the nerd-vs-jock dichotomy–I just don't care. It's probably how some of my fandom friends feel when I start going on about politics, or vice versa. Or any of you when I talk about home decor. (Or how the people at work feel when I start spouting off about any of my interests.) You just skim over those posts, right? Which is cool. There's always something that someone is Just. Not. Interested. In. It's fine if you're into these things but it's about as interesting as someone reading a calculus textbook out loud.

Nationalism is a different matter. I resent the implication that I'm supposed to "support Team Canada." What, by praying to the Sports God? With my tax dollars? Is this how ordinary Tim Hortons-swilling hosers felt about $1.8 million to buy "Voice of Fire" for the National Art Gallery? Borders are arbitrary and demarcated by violence. I have an opinion on nationalism and it generally involves me making angry faces.

Anyway, it is irritating me profusely that I can no longer easily read the news, or even be in a public space and avoid this stuff. You can't even sit down in a pub these days and not have the TV blasting or people talking loudly about some 'roided out athlete. It's a low-level but persistant irritation that gets worse when I think about how ordinary people's lives are shat-upon to turn London into a playground for rich fucks.

So. How much longer am I going to have to be pissy about this?

Comments

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

There's an olympics going on? Ok, yeah, we are kind of getting sand-blasted by the media about it, but I'm like you, all it does is annoy me.

[sabotabby]

I have this ritual that involves checking the Star every morning to find out what that scamp, the Honourable Wife Beater, has been up to. But now it's buried!

[dobrovolets.livejournal.com]

I find myself tuning away from NPR whenever they start talking about the Olympics (which is not entirely a bad thing). I am moderately interested in some sports, but it's so thoroughly drenched in nationalism--even more so than the World Cup--that I can't stomach the coverage even of the sports I like.

[sabotabby]

What irritates me the most is that it's not remotely Slow News Day out there. All kinds of shit is happening, and I can't get informed about it because sports.

[4thofeleven.livejournal.com]

It is rather nice that the official mascots seem to be designed with the theme of 'terrifying panopticon' in mind, so the godawful branding, the godawful security theatre, and the godawful civil liberties restrictions all seem to fit together nicely...

For my money, if we have to have sports and nationalism mixed together, I much prefer the World Cup - at least it seems like slightly more of a level playing field between contries, and nobody treats it as anything other than a sporting event, while the Olympics is, of course, a trancendal event that will transform us all...

[sabotabby]

I enjoy the World Cup; I can't watch an entire soccer match without getting bored, but if there's drinking and a large group of people involved, I'm entertained enough. And no one is nationalistic about Canada. My city reverts to national-ethnic rivalries, albeit in a friendly way, and this is far more amusing.

[xturtle.livejournal.com]

I love that you have pre-existing tags for this post.

I like sport as background noise. Once we sorted that we can turn up just the ambient noise with the commentary nearly muted on our stereo, it got even better. *Knit, knit, knit* *look up* "Hey, nice beam routine!" *knit some more* "Wow, that adorable little girl just beat out all the other swimmers!" (They all look little to me now. I swear I never was that baby-faced.)

Before they were muted I would snark the commentary on auto-pilot. I'd talk back to the TV without looking at it, and the husband got massively confused. But honestly, it's entirely deserved. Paying people to tell me how to think about an event is a snark-worthy offense.

[sabotabby]

I honestly don't understand sports commentary. Like, the same thing happens. A dude puts a ball in a hole. Or runs really fast. There's not that much to talk about. I find it so repetitive.

[radiumhead.livejournal.com]

Yup. Olympics. No fucks given.

[sabotabby]

Not a single fuck.

[90pointmetaphor.livejournal.com]

I fucking hate the Olympics. I think one of the best things Mel Lastman did as mayor was losing us the Olympics (though he did it with stupid-ass racist comments which were totally not ok).


Another thing to care about - the systemic discrimination against Muslim athletes/countries by putting the Olympics in the middle of Ramadan, when they're supposed to be fasting.

[sabotabby]

That hadn't even occurred to me, wow. Pretty evil.

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

Hmm. That "systemic"[*] in your comment got me wondering about stuff ...

I'm trying to figure out how often the Olympics have overlapped Ramadan, and what the scheduling constraints on the Olympics are (i.e. whether shifting the Olympics a few weeks earlier or later to miss Ramadan is a big deal or a minor tweak[**]), but I'm going to have to expend more effort than I have time for this afternoon to get all the historical dates of Ramadan in the Gregorian calendar (or converting the Gregorian dates for past and future Olympics to Islamic dates).

Though off the top of my head I suppose one approach would be to make it a factor in site selection -- for years in which Ramadan falls during northern-hemisphere summer, hold the summer games in the southern hemisphere, and for years in which Ramadan falls during northern-hemisphere winter, hold the winter games in the southern hemisphere.

It looks like there'll be no such conflict for the 2016 games -- in that year Ramadan will end 5 July and the games won't start until 5 August.

Since 1932 the summer Olympics seem to have been consistently about-two-weeks long, so not that difficult to squeeze in before or after Ramadan unless there are scheduling constraints I'm not aware of, but it looks like before then the Olympics lasted anywhere from two to five months, which would have presented a different degree of scheduling challenge (but one of purely academic interest, since I don't see a return to months-long Olympics in the future).

[*] Yeah, I understand that "systemic" most likely refers to the System just not giving a $#%^ about whether there's a problem or not in any given year, rather than some pattern of always having this calendar overlap. I started wondering about the frequency of the problem and the magnitude of accommodation required to avoid it -- how much institutional inertia would need to be overcome to convince TPTB to want to do more than issue a press release about how unfortunate it is that the calendar just happened to work out that way this year.

[**] It's not like the timing of Ramadan in the Gregorian calendar isn't predictable to within a few days, years in advance, even for people using the moon-sighting rules for the Islamic calendar instead of the pre-calculated version, unless some volcanic event blots out the sky for weeks at a time (in which case I don't know how the calendar would be adjusted, and we'd all have bigger problems to worry about anyhow).

[khalinche.livejournal.com]

You're telling me.

[sabotabby]

Ugh, it must be a million times worse over there, y/y?

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

Have they really been purging the poor and mentally ill from London? We're still here! Haven't heard anything about it here in London.
There were very few homeless people about anyway, and I am not near enough the Olympics to know whether there were many around there. I live in the middle of the "media hub," so you would expect that if they were moving homeless and mentally ill people out of sight there would be some sign of it here, but I have actually notcied quite a few people from local hostels taking advantage of the fact the usual crowds and traffic have all but vanished to sit around in the streets drinking and chatting more.

I will check tomorrow, though - I see if there are any homeless people around the tube station area, and if not I can ask the official Olympic guides what has happened. There are quite a lot of official guides in purple or yellow jackets looking extremely bored because there really is no one about. It is so cool! Sausage was so happy having the whole of Russell Square to himself yesterday. usually it is full of tourists and local workers having lunch.

The purging of the poor they have definitely done some of was a few years ago when they destroyed people's allotments to make the Olympic Park. They remade them elsewhere, but it must have been very upsetting still. I don't know whether they destroyed people's homes to build the awful shopping centre and sporty park too. They will have had to rehouse them, by law, and all new housing built in what is the sporty place will have to have a percentage of "affordable" housing, but of course the Tories have taken over since that rule was made and they have redefined "affordable" to mean completely insanely unaffordable.

I haven't actually looked into the subject, though, so would be interested (and furious) to hear what has actually happened in terms of removing poor people. Are you sure that isn't just the current Torydem policy of trying to force all poor people out of London, anyway? That is going on and is a huge issue, but is not to do with the bloody Olympics.

[sabotabby]

Admittedly, I've been dodging most coverage, even negative coverage. But it is a pattern; whenever the Olympics comes to a city, the tourist parts of the city get purged of undesirables. And I've heard anecdotal reports.

[khalinche.livejournal.com]

A lot of street-based and brothel-based sex workers have been cleared out of Newham and other Olympic boroughs recently, explicitly to 'clean' the area before the games. I don't think Voldesport can be blamed directly for the massive uptick in homelessness, I think that's more general Tory fuckwittery and landlord greed.

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

I have been pleasantly surprised at how NICE it is in London at the moment. Of course I am freaked out and furious about fucking missile launchers on rooftops. There were CCTV cameras absolutely everywhere anyway - there is nowhere you can walk in any area I know of where you are hidden from CCTV, in most of Britain except on Welsh hills and things. I am extremely upset about fucking unmanned drones, too.

And the helicopter noise is pissing me off, but we get that pretty much all the time anyway.

What I like is that the Olympics have turned out to be so unpopular that there are barely any tourists. It is the first time in my life I have not been surrounded by them. Yey! The local businesses are upset, though, They were ordered by the council here to keep extra long hours and sell Olympic tat, and have had barely any customers and are struggling. I have been chatting to local t-shirt stall man (I bought a t-shirt, er, very non-Olympic, of course, to cheer him up) and local newsagents and hardware shop people about it.

I hate hate hate the nationalism. I am surprised as I quite naively had no idea it was even an issue for the Olympics. I thought they were about the sports, not about childish competition. I genuinely believed people who loved sports didn't give a shit what nationality the winners were. Silly me.

[sabotabby]

You can't avoid the gigantic Team Canada ads here. They're everywhere, and particularly all over the subway. And at the movies. The best was when they ran after an ad for a (albeit sketchy as hell) mental health centre, which was around the theme of why mentally ill people can't just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. It was followed by the bootstraps-laden Olympic ads, "MY WILL IS STRONGER THAN MY WILL NOT" and neo-fascist imagery. Awesome.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

I was at a bar the night of the opening ceremony so they had it on all the televisions. All I could think was, "This is a country that just brought in an austerity budget."

[sabotabby]

They also had a Scumsucking Parasite Wedding. Clearly, it's only austerity for some.

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

Funny thing: I do like (some) sports, and usually care about the Olympics both for the chance to see some sports I don't usually see, and for the I-know-it's-stupid-but-I-feel-it-anyway national/ethnic[*] pride thang (though I care less about whether the US team wins a medal than whether the Baltimore Ravens[**] win one of their games) ...

... But this year I just don't care. Dunno whether it's distractions in my own life, or the degree to which the "Voldesport" aspect really put me off, but I just feel unaffected by the fact that the games have started. I'm more interested in the kvetching about how NBC is screwing up, than in the thing they're screwing up on. And when I walked into the kitchen where Mom was watching a soccer match, I found myself more interested in how much Americans have/haven't learned yet about how to show soccer on the telly, than in the score or how beautifully the players played.

So yeah, this year I just can't seem to give a [expletive] about the Olympics.

[*] Y'know, if I get a chance to cheer for a Cypriot, that feels kinda cool.

[**] A local professional American-football team I enjoy watching.

[sabotabby]

Apathy is your friend. What if they destroyed the economy of a city and no one came to watch?

[firecat]

I like watching people do athletic things that aren't the popular and ubiquitous athletic things, but I hate the nationalism, and I figure all the good bits will be up on YouTube shortly.

[sabotabby]

It always looks the same to me.

[sabotabby]

Damn. I thought I was unhappy because I've been too hermit-y lately but it turns out I haven't been hermit-y enough.

[fengi.livejournal.com]

I'm working harder to block out Olympic Fever this time, but it seems a lot easier to do now than with Beijing.

I suspect the lack of an exotic locale like China and the amount of shit going down around the globe has balanced out the power of the games' engineered distraction.

I listen to news podcasts from around the world and even though I have to fast forward through olympic coverage in most them, the segments are surprisingly short and the eagerness to report something negative is palpable.

I know it's only small traces, but this disaffection with the games gives me hope.

[sabotabby]

You are more optimistic than I am on this one! Here, it's wall-to-wall coverage of the spectacle.

[the_axel]

On the plus side, it does provide some lovely opportunities to mock The Honourable Wife Beaters British counterpart...

[sabotabby]

Hah. How did London end up with that?