My co-workers are sports enthusiasts. One doesn’t seem to understand that I don’t have “a team” for every season. (Or, as is the case, any season.) Another talks golf. All day, every day. Except right now.
Right now they’re all talking Olympics.
I just don’t get it. I don’t get watching sports on screens, or indeed watching much of anything on screens. I don’t get obsessing over winners and losers. I just don’t care. I don’t even know how I could be motivated to care. It’s just pointless.
Or maybe it’s worse than pointless. Pointless is walking around in circles or making card castles. This is lacking a point AND rather wasteful.
If you want to work your body, great! If you want to relieve ennui by throwing a ball around, fantastic! If you want to be healthy and happy, by all means go play physical games. (Though, maybe golf doesn’t actually meet that qualification…) But don’t go and guzzle up mountains of resources building Olympic swimming pools and elite gymnastics training centers. Don’t take my tax dollars and shovel them into football stadiums and basketball arenas. Don’t travel all over the globe to train and to compete, leaving a wake of jet exhaust and dirty hotel laundry, among other unsavories. Above all, don’t broadcast this shit!
Screen sports not only does nothing for any of the viewers except wasting an afternoon, it comes with a hefty social price-tag. Screen viewers are subjected to an onslaught of normative messaging, where the norms are the nastier aspects of the elite minority. Beer ads that objectify the female body are just the beginning. Name any insult and desecration and you will find it in the 20-30 minutes of advertising that comes with every hour of sports broadcasting.
And that’s just the obvious! The more insidious messaging is that what is being sold is desirable, acceptable, or at least not egregiously destructive. Yet, what is being peddled in sports advertising — as well as the competitive mentality itself — is nothing less than an existential threat to all life on this planet. How do people sit and gawk at this shit! For hours! And then talk about it!!!
I don’t know how they tolerate the endless spewing of drug ads, car ads, cruise ads, more car ads, fast food ads, insurance, another car ad, investing, AARP… I mean, we know who the target audience is. Those people with money to invest in cars and cruises and insurance and sports paraphernalia. But if they have money to buy all that entertainment, one wonders why they would be watching television. I sometimes think the object isn’t to sell this stuff to viewers as much as it is to attach status to this stuff, to make it valuable and venerable in the minds of all the people watching, whether they can buy it or not. Because even if they can never gain these things, they will give everything they have in a vain pursuit of the status this crap confers.
But advertising aside… (oof… shoving that off is like trying to shift a quadriplegic elephant with a teaspoon… but anyway…)
What is fun about watching sports on a screen? Playing sports, ok, fun! Going to watch your kid’s baseball game, also fun! There is a thrill to seeing people do amazing things with their bodies, even on a screen. So that’s fun… But it’s just ruined by the commentary and the judging and the camera that always seems to miss the amazing while its gaze is laser-focused on every little error. Also… screens simply can’t take in a whole soccer pitch. So much of the game is lost to the producer trying to figure out which camera has the ball. From what I’ve seen of basketball, that’s even worse. But then that’s not that fun to watch live either… they just run back and forth, back and forth, dumping the ball through the hoop on each loop, with an occasional whistle to stop the running for reasons that largely remain opaque to most viewers. And then there are the glacial games like baseball. I love baseball, but I hate watching it on tv. Way too much nothing happening; and then when it does, it happens so fast the camera can’t follow it.
But the Olympics? Some of it is interesting… but… OK, I was a swimmer as a kid. I got up in the morning and swam laps, did sprints, swallowed more chlorinated water than I like to think. And I was good. I set records. I could beat anyone by a body-length or more. So I know what these swimmers have gone through to get where they are. I can appreciate what they do. I can even get a little excited when they are all coming down the last length of a grueling 1500, pulling up miraculous reserves of energy to make the last few meters an all-out sprint. I can sort of get into all that, watching it on a screen… because I used to do it… but…
My sisters were also swimmers. Really good swimmers. In fact, one of them was tapped for the Barcelona Olympic team… But my parents couldn’t afford to get her there.
Which is perhaps what I find so annoying about all this. I watched the opening ceremonies (which was cool, if somewhat perplexing… What was that hooded torch bearer on the rooftops supposed to mean anyway? And did anyone else think the blood spurting out the windows was a bit over the top?). This year, with teams parsed out on boats, one thing was glaring: the poor are not Olympians. Poor countries do not have large teams. Rich countries do not have poor athletes. This is a celebration not of people who do amazing things, but of people who have the money to flaunt the amazing things that money can buy. Yes, they have to train hard to get to that level. Yes, few people could do that even with a boundless budget. But nobody gets to the Olympics without spending a fortune. And all I can think when I am seeing this spectacle is: Couldn’t we be spending all these fortunes and all this hard work on something more productive?
If you want to build up your body strength and endurance, here’s a shovel. Pick your mess. If you have discretionary funds, I’m sure there are any number of projects in your own neighborhood that are unfunded. If nothing else, buy a kid a book. Or a baseball glove.
Go do real things. Get other people to do real things with you. Now that would be amazing! And imagine what we could accomplish if we took the whole edifice that is Sports and rolled it all into real people doing real things all over the globe. Poor countries. Rich countries. Poor neighborhoods within rich countries. Everybody everywhere doing amazing things!
And not a car ad to worry us…
Though I am still wondering about that torch bearer…
©Elizabeth Anker 2024
By My Solitary Hearth 
We cannot get the live Olympics on our television package. I hear results on the radio while I am cooking and, the other day, one of my brothers told me about a friend’s son winning a gold medal for Australia. Clearly, it doesn’t form a large role in my life. You mention money. Now that is a huge issue: you cannot afford the time off earning a salary to put in the training required without adequate sponsorship; “But my parents couldn’t afford to get her there” is another issue – how can one afford to get there to represent one’s country if that country won’t get you there? As for advertisements … they leave me cold.
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Playing sports and watching them, growing food and buying it at the supermarket, cooking whole foods from scratch and going out to eat. There is a difference between doing real things and paying others to do it for you. It’s the difference between some degree of autonomy and a life of wage slavery and colonial dependency. I always thought there was little harm in watching sports. After all, sports are one thing in life we can feel passionate about that in the end has no real importance and certainly no lasting impacts. That is OK, if you have things other than sports that you can feel passionate about. It becomes pathological when you are more passionate about sports than the things that really matter – especially doing real things.
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