“I feel like I was born to have babies and play volleyball.” – Kerri Walsh Jennings
“Not all treasure is silver and gold, mate.” – Jack Sparrow
Watching The Olympic Games is like watching a cockfight, minus the blood, ruffled feathers, animal rights violations, and maimed roosters. Actually, it seems that at every Olympics, some Olympian says something that ruffles the public’s proverbial feathers and someone gets seriously injured, but usually there is no blood.
The public’s feathers were sufficiently ruffled when it learned about Italian Gymnast Carlotta Ferlito, who made racist comments three years ago about World Champion, Simone Biles. Ferlito received a large and steaming pile of righteous abuse on every social media platform in existence this week. She has received more criticism this week for her racist comments than three years ago when she actually made the comments. No one had any reason to say anything about it three years ago because no one cared enough to report on anything related to gymnastics. That is reserved for the one-hour interval every four years the public remembers what gymnastics is. Someone at NBC decided they needed something to spice up that hour, and brought the comments into the light of an indignant public, who were furious that an American Olympian (What was her name again?) had to endure racism in the 21st century. This indignation was quickly forgotten when a meme of Michael Phelps’ pre-swim face became the new focus of social media. But I digress.
The games fascinate, horrify, exhilarate, induce guilt, and give people a glimpse into a millennia-old tradition, much like the sacred ritual of throwing two roosters into a pit and betting on which one will kill the other. The question is why do people watch the Olympics instead of a cockfight?
The rush Michael Phelps gives to the crowd when he begins to slowly creep up on his opponent in the 200 fly is nowhere near as potent as the rush the crowd gets when a rooster slowly slashes an adversary to death.
Cockfighting is actually older than the Olympics with a much more interesting history. Cockfighting could be said to have been as much a part of Greek and Roman culture as Star Wars is in American Culture. It had assumed a religious significance in the Indus Valley almost 1,000 years before the first Olympic games.
The guilt that stems from witnessing the sometimes serious injuries to roosters in the ring is comparable to the guilt and sense of underachieving many people feel while watching the Olympic games.
It is very difficult to watch 19-year-old Katie Ledecky shattering world records and the hopes of her competitors as a 19-year-old and feel like you’ve accomplished anything in life.
I usually feel fairly successful. I have a job, good grades, and I attend college. I can cook pasta, black beans, and steak fairly easily. I can even play a mean game of corn hole. I cannot perform two and a half back-somersaults, with two and a half twists, after launching myself off a ten-meter platform before hitting the water at 40 mph. Nor do I have a friend that can do it perfectly in synch with me. Who does nowadays?
I do have a friend that can chug a fifth of Jack Daniels, and another friend that can eat 60 Totino’s Pizza Rolls. But I digress again.
The reason that almost 30 million people watched the Olympics, on NBC alone, during the women’s team gymnastics final and didn't watch a cockfight on YouTube is greatness.
A rooster can win every single fight it finds itself in, and it will never be great. A rooster could kill a wild boar with only its beak and not be considered great. A rooster could grill a steak while surfing in Tahiti, on a mission to defeat the Russians, and still not be considered great. Kerri Walsh Jennings and the hundreds of other athletes at the games are great.
There is no other way to describe a woman who is undefeated in Olympic Volleyball matches, mother to three kids and genuinely nice, as anything other than great. She is doing something so far out of the realm of possibility for most humans that we don’t feel guilty for not participating. We feel inspired by her, and I am personally seized by the urge to go shoot a large gun and buy an absurdly large American flag every time she sends a Chinese spike back into the dirt with her absurdly strong hands and her towering height.
No cockfight can truly transcend time and place, where and when it happens. However, a great Olympic event can connect with people on a million different levels and be related to any number of world events.
No cockfight can truly be beautiful. Not in the way that watching Usain Bolt lopes along with ease of a cat, moving almost as fast as the eye can track, wearing his countries colors can be.
No cockfight can convey the primal sense of nationalism in the way that Michael Phelps does when he demolishes the competition, all the while sporting a USA cap on his head.
No cockfight can compete with the Olympics, and I hope everyone understands that. I know sometimes I don’t.
