The Chris Moeller Archives

The Lesser Olympics

I’m intrigued by the saga of Des Moines native Lolo Jones competing at Sochi. Jones is the track and field star who flopped at the Summer Games in 2012 and now has re-invented herself as a bobsledder in winter competition. I’m interested in this for more than just the local angle. It dovetails into a strongly-held opinion of mine that some sports competitions are simply not worth watching because the greatest athletes of the planet are either completely disinterested or effectively excluded.

I’m prepared to name names on these sports. Here’s a partial list of athletes that don’t generally impress me: golfers, tennis players, and bicyclists, for socioeconomic reasons; hockey players, speedskaters, and skiers, for climate reasons. Even before Lance Armstrong was “disgraced” and banned from the world of cycling due to his use of performance-enhancing yada yada blah blah blah, you would not have colored me impressed with his achievements. I truly believe this: If Allen Iverson had made the conscious decision, anytime between the ages of 8 and 14, to become a bicyclist, rather than a basketball player, neither you nor I would recognize the name “Lance Armstrong" today. Another good place to begin this argument is with an examination of the biographies of either Earl Woods or Richard Williams. These were two men of modest financial means (Williams' more modest than Woods') that famously put their children on the fast track to fame and fortune by training them in the comparatively less competitive worlds of golf and tennis, respectively.

This is also why I otherwise have no interest in the winter edition of the Olympics. It’s more than coincidental that the cold weather games, which are, by default, the exclusive playground of countries north of approximately 40 degrees latitude anyway, didn’t even exist until roughly the same point in history that brown and black-skinned peoples started competing in and dominating nearly all of the summer competitions. My wife is from Kenya. I asked her if she had any interest in watching the Winter Olympics next month. Of course she doesn’t. There are no Kenyans-- no Africans at all--  in the Winter Olympics. At the equator, they don't even have snow covering their mountain peaks.

There seems to be discernible resentment in some Olympic circles towards Lolo Jones because of what she is even attempting to do in crossing over. (Jones, incidentally, is of mixed-race heritage, and was raised in abject poverty.) Her critics don't admit it, but the root of their oft-heard complaint that Jones is “taking up a slot” otherwise set aside for somebody that has "worked her entire life to be an Olympic bobsledder" is that her success turns a mirror towards the talent discrepancy between the original Olympics and its younger sister. Up until the present day, the only prerequisite for being an Olympic ski-jumper, for example, is to have been brought up by a family living in a northern climate with an annual household income of at least $200,000. What if Jones' public ambition encourages copycats? If Lolo is nothing else, she's highly practical. Highly motivated to win Olympic gold, she has decided to take an easier route to it than the one she chose back in high school. The fact that she took up the sport of bobsledding at the age of 30, and can almost immediately be considered among the best in the world, tells us all we need to know.

posted by CM @ 7:12 PM