Cranky About the Olympics

I grew up in a neighborhood with a ton of kids. There were four Morrison children, four Murphys, two O’Connors, four (or five?) Finnerans, at least five and maybe seven Sullivans, and ten Fitzpatricks. You can tell by the names and numbers it was an Irish Catholic neighborhood, and I was the lone Greek kid. (I explore my Greek roots with Dmitri, the character I wrote in The Girl on the Ferris Wheel, my collaboration with Julie Halpern.) Ethnic homogeneity aside, Colonial Heights was a great place to come of age.

When we weren’t watching Gilligan’s Island and Brady Bunch re-runs, we were outside playing. We founded our own kid detective agencies, solving vexing neighborhood crimes; we emulated Fonzie and Evel Knievel, setting up ramps to jump our bicycles over garbage cans; we played Ringolevio, a game somewhere between hide and seek and all-out neighborhood war; and once every four years — notably in 1972 and again in 1976, when I was seven and eleven respectively — we staged a neighborhood-wide kid olympics.

The real Olympics was a big deal to us. It was the era of Mark Spitz, Frank Shorter, Edwin Moses, Bruce (now Caitlyn) Jenner, and the controversial US vs the USSR basketball gold medal final. (We were still a bit too young in 1972 to fully comprehend the horror of the Munich Massacre as it came to be known.) The Olympic Games dominated conversation, igniting our imaginations and our sense of national pride. None of the athletes — all amateurs — were known to us until the games began; by the time of the closing ceremonies, they were our heroes.

We went into our yards to try our hands at long jumps and high jumps. We took to the streets with 100-yard dashes and races around the very long block on which we lived (our marathon). We even had an ill-fated attempt at pole vault, using a broom stick. When it was time to award medals, I don’t have a specific memory of this, but I’m pretty sure we tried to sing the national anthem while decorating the victors.

It was amazing.

Flash forward half a century.

While my younger son is showing some interest in the Tokyo games, it’s not the same.

First, there are simply too many distractions. It was pretty easy for us to choose the decathlon over Greg and Marsha. Would we have made that same choice if we had RoBlox, Minecraft, and Mark Rober?

Second, even though I know it was probably something of a sham internationally, the athletes in the 1970s were amateurs. They competed for love of the game and love of country. After the Olympics, they went back to their lives as college students, actuaries, and truck drivers. Yes, the best of the best wound up with endorsement deals, but money was not the primary concern. Speed, agility, strength, and above all, mental fortitude were the currency of those games.

Third and finally, and here’s where you can call me especially cranky, do Beach Volleyball and Skateboarding really have a place in the Olympics? Don’t get me wrong, the competitors in each of these sports are insanely talented and train incredibly hard to be the best their nations have to offer. But both contests seem out of place. Skateboarding started as a counterculture expression of teen angst. To watch a panel of august judges to try to put that angst in a box is as ridiculous as enshrining rock and roll in a hall of fame. (Yeah, don’t get me started.) And isn’t beach volleyball a thing to do with your friends late in the afternoon when the sun is setting and the beer is flowing? That they Olympic Committee constructs a fake beach in a stadium makes it seem an awful lot like BASEketball

Interestingly, without my prodding, my son is asking to watch the traditional track and field events. He wants to see the long jump and hammer throw, the pole vault and the 100M. (He was all about Usain Bolt in the last Olympics.) He’s also interested in swimming and archery and was in awe of the female gymnasts on the uneven bars.  Maybe it’s his half-Greek blood (the other half, Irish, suggests I’m a product of my upbringing) that draws him to those classic contests of human physical and mental endurance. Whatever the case, it’s sad to me that he and his brother don’t view the games with the same fervor my friends and I once had. What I can’t figure out is if the games have changed, the times have changed, or I have changed. Probably all of the above.

Lastly, I can’t post about the Olympics without giving a shout out to the only Vlahos to ever compete in a modern Olympics — I like to think my ancestors in Ancient Greece were fierce competitors, but given my genetic allergy to sports, the ancient Vlahai were likely water bearers for the real athletes — my nephew Zach Vlahos, who was the cox in the men’s eight boat in London in 2012. I think of him every time I tune in.