more olympic insanity

[dancingyel]

yes, it is in fact 4:20am. this is because thunderstorms knocked out power in (apparently) many parts of tucson this evening, and my complex didn't have electricity from about 8:30 to about 2:00am. this was rather inconvenient, given that i wanted to watch swimming and the men's gymnastics all-around competition. so, the logical solution was to go to bed, be awoken by all the lights turning on at 2 (oops!), and get up to watch nbc's primetime replay, amusingly brought to us by ambien cr (a sleep medication).

i have many thoughts about the games themselves, most of them too hyper or too whiny or too pedestrian to want to write down, so i will instead share more amusing quotes from the NY Times, which has become my main source for articles about the olympics.

this entire article, about the completely amazing and sometimes distressing bodies of the olympic athletes is pretty great throughout, but several parts made me actually giggle out loud:

"Here are the gnomish female gymnasts, seemingly more compact than ever, more muscularly developed and yet at the same time troublingly arrested, to judge from the lack of secondary sexual characteristics like breasts.

Here is Dara Torres, the 41-year-old swimmer with the blister-pack abs and the padded deltoids, her stupendous physique attained, she says, through Herculean training, and now unquestionably resembling that of a cover boy for Men’s Health."

"Even in the classical world, the range of forms at the Games was broad enough to encompass lean bodies suited to running, wiry wrestlers with bantam bodies, refrigerator-size hulks capable of feats like lifting a young ox (and then consuming it later: certain athletes at the ancient Games gained laurels, while others won all they could eat). A mosaic floor in a fourth-century villa at the Piazza Armerina in Sicily depicts three female athletes playing some sort of ball game and wearing bandeau bikinis. One of them looks distinctly like that Diana of beach volleyball, Kerri Walsh."

"What the Games also frankly accommodate is a taste for the spectacle of straining young bodies, an appeal that was not lost on the ancients. The crowds at the early Games, according to the historian Nigel Spivey, were as excited by the “boys with slim waists, broad shoulders, neatly proud buttocks and springy thighs” as they were by the lofty ideal of the Games."

oh, dear. springy thighs? neatly proud buttocks? what does that actually mean, and do i really want to know? i'm sad though, that while the article briefly mentioned michael phelps, it didn't really talk about male swimmers who, to me, have the ideal male body type. also, cin, this picture (from the accompanying slide show) is for you. :)

this article about china winning all the diving golds thus far isn't really funny in and of itself. however, i find it fairly awesome that the picture accompanying it is not, in fact, of divers, but of tennis player roger federer. huh? this may be corrected, so sorry if it's not funny by the time some of you read it, but i'm very entertained.

ok, it is time to actually sleep. man, i'm on a weird schedule these days!

Comments

[owens888.livejournal.com]

The Greeks were really, really gay.

Also, from an NYT article about Michael Phelps:
"[Michael Phelp's coach] Bowman owns racehorses— one of his 3-year-olds, Vanderkaay, won the Dancing Count Stakes in February— and he often sounds like a trainer of thoroughbreds when he talks about Phelps.

Asked last week how he was handling Phelps in the days before the biggest meet of his life, Bowman said, "We just basically give him a little training and try to just keep him happy."

He made no mention of treats of sugar cubes or carrots, though Bowman has been known to feed Phelps Quaker Oats for breakfast when they are at competitions. "

[owens888.livejournal.com]

Also, from the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/15/sports/olympics/15soccer.html?pagewanted=2&hp

The Chinese coach on China's soccer team: “There are two things stopping the Chinese soccer team from going outside Asia to take part in international games: their left feet and their right feet.”

[dancingyel.livejournal.com]

Hehehehe! Oh, dear. Not a good assessment of the team, that one.

[owens888.livejournal.com]

Also gay: http://jezebel.com/5036020/golden-boys-clement-lefert-teammate

[dancingyel.livejournal.com]

Yum. Sometimes the slash just writes itself. *hides*

[dancingyel.livejournal.com]

Yes! I read this, too, and was so amused, I quoted it to several people on AIM. I couldn't find it to put in this entry, though, so I'm glad you did!

[chimerically.livejournal.com]

Huh, funny that female gymnasts aren't "female" because they don't have substantial breasts, and that musculature == manliness. There are some pretty strong normative statements in there ...

I can't read the rest of the article because bugmenot.com seems to be down so I can't log in.

Here's an interesting note on the diets of Olympians:
http://contexts.org/socimages/?p=2137

[owens888.livejournal.com]

Your point about Dara Torres is well-taken. But I would be shocked if any of the women's gymnasts, particularly on China's team, have finished puberty yet. Between their intense physical training and the detrimental effect a growth spurt would have on their balance and mass, I don't think it would be possible or allowed. If that's true, it's not so surprising that they look "arrested."

[chimerically.livejournal.com]

It may be true, though there are still some problematic aspects of it -- this blog post summarizes it well:

... Firstly there is the racial component. When all the NBC commentators are talking about how the Chinese gymnasts don't "look" 16 or they "look very young," there is a subtext of "they don't look like a Western girl does at 16." In fact, Asian women often appear younger than Western women. The evaluation of age based on what people look like is neither a scientific method nor an unbiased assessment. (But I'll indict myself and disclose that I think they "look" hella young.)

Then there is the sexism component. This takes two parts (at least). The "because they are girls we must protect them" part and the "policing what female bodies are supposed to do and look like" part. I admit to being less troubled by the former, even when I intellectually recognize it's importance. It is true that we are more reactive about protecting 14 yr old female bodies than male bodies, it is true that we hype up the rhetoric of vulnerability around female atheletes in a way we don't with men. It is true that this is unfair. But I also think it is true that young women are more poorly served by the realities of elite athleticism when it comes to psycho-social body image issues, and therefore deserve heightened attention. ...

[owens888.livejournal.com]

I mostly agree with that post, although it omits the fact that there is objective evidence that two of the Chinese gymnasts are younger than the age limit. That guy quoted in the interview sounds like a sexist idiot, and if the 16 yr old age limit was instituted because of audience's desires to ogle female gymnasts, it's wrong and should be scrapped.

The ideal body for women's gymnastics as it is currently scored is a point with zero mass and volume attached to four massless, infinitely flexible and strong lines to serve as arms and legs. The best approximation to this ideal is a strong prepubescent girl. Athletes, coaches, and nations have no incentive to conserve the athlete's long-term health, because she has a few years when she approaches this ideal and that's it. The 14-yr-old male diver has many more years and Olympics to compete; in fact his synchronized diving partner is 26. He's not going to try to detach his retinas to get a medal. But a 14 yr old female gymnast may well injure herself and wreck her quality of life for the rest of her life trying to get a gold. That partially explains why, currently, 14 yr old gymnasts need to be "protected" and 14 yr old male divers don't. If the incentive structure was changed, by say adding weight or age classes, or by changing the way women's gymnastics are scored, gymnastics could probably avoid paternalistic rules like the age limit.

[dancingyel.livejournal.com]

It's true to a degree that muscular bodies *look* more masculine to us because that's what we're used to seeing, but I think it's pretty silly to apply that kind of standard to an Olympic athlete. The coverage, in general, has been pretty different for men and women through these games.

Interesting videos, those. Interesting to see the female swimmer with the trainer who's very focused on eating healthy, while Michael Phelps just eats what he wants. I wonder if, as the blog says, that's cultural gender differences at work there.