There have been times this past week that I've wondered what happened to all the Olympic sports that don't involve shooting at things, lifting things, Park Tae Hwan or Michael Phelps (which sounds more like P-ehl-suh when spoken in Korean).
After returning from Daegu at 7:30 this morning, I spent my day sleeping and watching Olympic tennis on the internet. While this may strike some as lame, for me this is a pretty fantastic day. The only thing that would have made it better would have been if I could have called up Dominos and ordered a pizza. My Korean sucks, so if I want a pizza I have to walk down the street, point at pictures, and then carry my pizza home. Given that I had two very important matches to attend to, this was not an option.
In case the above hadn’t already made this evident, I’m a huge sports geek. While tennis is my ball of choice, I have been known to fall into dweeb mode over hockey, figure skating, gymnastics, various track and field events, swimming, and even golf. Yes, golf. Watching Sergio Garcia find new and exciting ways to lose to Padraig Harrington has become a favourite annual event of mine. As a sports geek, I consider it my biennial duty to take in as much of the Olympics as possible.
Having been raised on a steady diet of Olympic sports like swimming, track and field, and gymnastics, I’ve come to expect certain things from my regional broadcasters. These things generally do not include a heavy focus on archery, weight lifting, shooting, handball, or judo. A week of increased exposure to these Olympic sports has led me to conclude the following: archery and shooting are interesting for no longer two minutes at a time, weight lifting is interesting for no longer than ten seconds at a time, judo is okay, and handball is rather awesome. Oh, and Koreans tend to do fairly well in most of these events. Who knew that they kicked Summer Olympics ass?
There have been times over the past week where I’ve flipped through the three stations offering Olympic coverage, and found myself wanting to chuck the remote at the screen. When expecting to find live gymnastics team finals, I found a badminton match, more archery, and the 317th replay of Park Tae Hwan winning South Korea’s first ever swimming meal. This was one of those times.
During class this week, I decided to bring in some English news papers to encourage discussion with my students, many of whom had told me that they have enjoyed watching the games this past week. To start the class, I polled them on what their favourite sports are, and then brainstormed to see how many different sports they could provide the English name for. Archery and weight lifting were almost always among the top three that they thought of (they rarely knew the word for these, and would act-it-out for me instead), which tended to be rounded out with swimming, taekwando, or judo. This is bizarre to me.
While I’ve enjoyed my exposure to a different sporting culture, were it not for a series live streams of international Olympic awesomeness that I managed to find the internet, I would certainly be cranky right now. Yet, if I were at home, I’d likely be whining about the inane commentators. I have spent the few moments that I’ve picked up live streams from the United States, Canada, or parts of Europe whining about jingoism and craving objectivity. The commentators may well be equally inane here, but my failure to understand a word of their potential inanity, renders my Korean commentators almost completely unnoticeable. And that’s more or less just how I like it. Now, if I wise up next time and pick a place that shows the sports I like and speaks a language that I don't understand, I'll have one less thing to bitch about.
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