When I run out of sensible things to amuse myself with on the internet, I read up on the most embarrassing moments of other people's lives. It would be convenient if the Wikimedia people just set up one of those list pages under the heading "Debacles", but they don't, so I have to go link hopping in order to find hilari-awful things. Like the story of the 2010 Commonwealth Games , wherein one of their crowning achievements in the area of Things No One Will Ever Live Down was when a ranking member of the organizing committee decided -- correctly -- that the least mortifying way to respond to a comment a South African swimmer made about the crowds in Delhi was to publicly admit that they were having a problem keeping feral monkeys out of the pool area. (The article mentions in passing that there are feral monkeys all over Delhi. No kidding. Apparently the local method of getting rid of a large number of small loud thieving monkeys is to procure a single much larger l
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Gymnastics is the summer equivalent to figure skating: very pretty, very difficult, very sexist, and full of eating disorders. If these are your main criteria for making something a sport, I have no idea why they don't run Olympic ballet, but nobody asked me, and I have a feeling that logic is not the strong suit of the IOC. It is, in fact, even more overtly sexist than figure skating in many respects, and that's something when your main competition is a sport that regulates the color of the shoes you're wearing under costume spats anyway. The men and ladies of figure skating at least run the same events (singles skates for each gender, pairs skates, ice dancing, and formerly the actual figures, the set of which was the same for both genders), albeit the requirements are somewhat different between the sexes, whereas in gymnastics the only events both genders have in common are floor exercise and vault. Men work on parallel bars, high bar, pommel horse, and rings; women wo
Yannow, I was all prepared to watch Johnny Weir go over to Sochi and be really upset at no longer feeling welcome in a place that was so important to him -- either Russia or the Olympics. The best he expected, I think, was a kind of peace by silence, where a lot of athletes would defend the apolitical nature of the games but refuse to comment, even diplomatically, about the Russian Federation's new law. And at worst, the Russians would renege on their stated policy of 'you don't go poking us with sticks, we don't go poking you with deportation proceedings'. He's having a blast instead. I'm glad. He's spending half his time playing dress-up with Tara Lipinski and cluttering all the Instagram accounts he has access to with photos of shoes and shiny renditions of Cheburashka , and the other half being more than a bit overwhelmed by the show of support from athletes and personnel from all around the world. And I do mean all around the world. In addition
I've watched a lot more of Johnny Weir, and also had several drinks, and I have concluded: I need some better vocabulary for talking about this. One of the terrible things I keep running into when writing about this stuff is that the word "gay" now has a sort of double meaning: We use it to mean both 'having a homosexual orientation' and 'behaving in a way, often in conflict with traditional gender representation, that is associated with communities of homosexual people', and it's only very recently that these have become not the same thing . It used to be that gay men were not terribly welcome in straight society, and reciprocally that straight men were not terribly welcome in gay society -- there was not a lot of chance for behaviors to cross-pollinate, as it were, and there was the added element of animosity that made it dangerous to be mistaken for someone on the other side of the line. You can still run into problems, depending to a positively s
The main fight over the 2014 Sochi Olympics seems to be whether a recent Russian law banning "propaganda" involving "non-traditional sexual relations" qualifies as a matter of politics or of practical safety. The International Olympic Committee categorically does not get involved in politics. It was specifically founded as a non-political oversight committee for the Olympic Games, which are by definition global. In a situation where it is impossible to avoid politics to any reasonable extent -- such as, for example, a world war -- the IOC cancels the games. There were no Olympics in 1916, 1940 and 1944, because we were all busy shelling the shit out of each other, and there was nowhere to hold them that someone would not have promptly shelled the shit out of as well. The Committee will get involved in matters of human rights, but only if it pertains to the safety and security of the Olympic Games, the athletes, the support staff, and to a large extent, the specta
I find, paging through Olympics history, that I recognize a much higher proportion of the figure skaters than any other athletes. They must get their post-games publicity in places I actually pay some attention to. I couldn't identify any of the luge team if you paid me. Most of the other competitors, I only remember if they were in the news for being an Olympic athlete and something else. Carl Lewis and Jackie Joyner-Kersee , I recognize mainly because I went through the public school system in Arizona, and apparently they are too lazy to notice that there are actually a lot of athletes that are not pasty white. Jesse Owens is famous for embarrassing Nazi Germany in 1936 by generally not being an inferior specimen. More recently, Michael Phelps made headlines for admitting he'd tried marijuana, right up until the point where everyone realized he wasn't actually high at the Olympics, and then it wasn't interesting anymore. I have a vague recollection of someone n
I'm a little surprised that no one has jumped down my throat over my checking the idea of "acting straight" when writing about the latest Olympic to-do. It occurs to me that if you're sufficiently young and enlightened, you may not recognize that as actually a Thing. I think it's pretty clear from context that what I'm talking about is intentionally suppressing mannerisms and behaviors traditionally associated with homosexuality in the hopes that no one will ask any awkward questions, and it's pretty clear from the quotes that it's not my phrase. It's just that as a concept, it doesn't have much meaning anymore. It describes the act of consciously crossing a cultural divide that has largely ceased to exist, even if the memory of the underlying stereotype persists. Twenty-five years ago, "acting straight" or describing someone as "straight-acting" had a distinct meaning, and it would be disingenuous to pretend that it did
I am pleased to note that President Obama appears to be trolling the Russians. He's politely declined to attend the Olympics, but generously offered as his emissaries a number of extremely famous American athletes who also happen to be gay. Putin could still opt to arrest them, I suppose, but now that we've announced that there will be a quintillion cameras focused on them at all times, and the story would break on Twitter before they finished snapping the cuffs on, so this is an unlikely result at best. Accompanying this story is the news that Brian Boitano has come out. If you know who he is, you probably expressed vague confusion and asked if he didn't already do that like twenty years ago? Anyone who has ever seen this man has quickly come to the conclusion that the only closet he's familiar with is the kind that is full of sequinned ice dancing costumes . If you're too young to know who Brian Boitano is or why the hell he is on Food Network, Boitano is the