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Turn Out the Torch, Time to Move the Party

Google told me Kevin Martin was only 43. I'd have guessed 50. Never mind, the Canadian curler still rates my pick as the star of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games anyhow. I won't hold his young whippersnapperdom against him.

Martin, who has been the dominant player (if that's really the right word) in his sport for well over a decade, won his first Olympic gold medal last night. I'd say his smiling face pretty much summarized why all the money, mindless petty bureaucracy, time and trouble of any Olympics are well worth putting up and putting up with. Watching a career fulfilled is a rewarding experience for the audience as well as the athlete.

For a good many American sports fans, the Vancouver Games will be known as the curling Olympics, and we have NBC Universal Sports to thank for it. For reasons known only to itself, the US Olympics broadcaster decided that curling would be a sport it would telecast daily in real time live action on CNBC, once the stock touts quit work at 5 p.m. Eastern.

I am one of those fans who will watch ANY event live rather than on tape delay. Downhill skiing is approximately 100 trillion times more exciting than curling as a television event. But not if you already know the result, it isn't. So, just before and after dinnertime, curling became a part of my February sports diet (there is nothing else on in that time frame except local weatherpeople rooting for big storms).

My exposure to curling followed a familiar pattern. First I was amused, then baffled, and then I found myself getting into it. By the end last night, I was absorbed. Martin had all Canada pulling for him -- plus me. I sure that put him over the top.

That is exactly the pattern I experienced in the unfamiliar Olympic sports I covered live and in person for the Herald. From judo to figure skating to fencing to Greco-Roman wrestling, I began my exposure to those sports filled with dread and scorn, and ended up as a temporary big fan. Those games were worth learning about and worth watching, and their heroes and goats were fully worthy of celebration and pity.

Like I said, it's temporary. I don't go online to stay au courant with the wide world of fencing. But I won't change the channel when it comes on from London in 2012 either.

And that, I believe, is what justifies all the excess and bullshit endemic to every Olympic Games. Not even the International Olympic Committee is far gone enough to believe the Games further the cause of the brotherhood of man. They do, however, further the brotherhood and sisterhood of sports. Learning about a new sport is not unlike living for a time in a foreign country. It challenges your prejudices. It makes your mind work in new ways. If you like sports, it's good for you.

Kevin Martin's smile was oddly familiar to me. Then I remembered. I had seen the very same smile before -- on the face of every person in the Red Sox clubhouse at old Busch Stadium on an October night in 2004. Fulfillment never changes, thank heavens.

In the final, most cosmic sense, each Olympic Games carries the same message. All games are different, and all games are alike, and all games are worth it.

Come to think of it, kind of like people.

posted by Michael Gee @ 8:56 AM