I’m not much of a sports fan, but I love the Olympics. I know, I know —the International Olympic Committee is a bloated, corrupt institution; the amateur athletics label is outdated and hypocritical; it can royally suck to live in a city where the games are being held, and all the cool kids are watching NBA basketball. But I don’t care. The Olympic games are awesome. They are a celebration of humanity at its finest. The Olympic motto Citius, Altius, Fortius—Faster, Higher Stronger—is as pure a distillation of the Enlightenment ideal as has ever been written. And even though the games are rife with nationalism, the gathering of our disparate tribes to compete with each other inevitably leads to the conclusion that humanity is all one big tribe, as the sportsmanship of the athletes surface to show that our commonalities clearly outweigh our differences.
As an Olympic fanboy, I was naturally excited as the 2012 London games approached. I believe it’s important to have goals, so, inspired by the Olympian ideal and given my current state of underemployment, I decided that this time around, I would watch ALL of the games. Of course, that’s pretty much impossible, given that there are 26 sports divided into 39 individual disciplines. So I refined my goal. I would watch at least one game-unit of each sport. Given that NBC was devoting 16 hours a day of their airtime on four different TV stations and streaming the entire games live on the internet, surely this would be possible. And if Michael Phelps could devote most of his life to his attempt to become the greatest Olympic athlete of all time, devoting a couple of weeks of my time on the couch with the iPad and cable TV was the least I could do, right?
I got started a day before the opening ceremonies when I accidentally caught a soccer game while trying to figure out exactly which channels I would be frequenting over the course of the Olympics. Its seems that the soccer tournament has to start early in order to fit a complete tournament in before the closing ceremonies. I filled in my first two entries in my Olympic journal: Men’s and Women’s Soccer. Cool, I thought. I have a head start!
