I was writing two columns simultaneously, a task based largely on lollipops-and-unicorns style denial for someone who can rarely crank out two columns in the same fiscal quarter. As they were developing, however, I found they had a nexus. Not a fantastic nexus per se, or even one that will allow one fully fleshed-out article to transition smoothly into another. But a nexus, nonetheless. So I shoved them together. ENJOY!
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My wife and I have very different tastes in television shows. She enjoys fact-driven reality shows like “Locked Up Abroad,” “Gangland,” or “The World’s Tiniest Ninja Genius.”[i] I somehow like shows worse than those. Like anything on network television, for instance. Nightly, there’s a battle for the remote control, with me usually learning new gang signs not to throw in urban areas. Or how to avoid the more infamous parts of prison life. Or how being a very smart little person might aid you in your professional life of ninja-ism.
We do agree, however, on two shows every year: Fox’s “American Idol” and Bravo’s “Top Chef.”[ii] Both shows share characteristics that my wife and I can enjoy, as well as features that differentiate them from other reality competitions. Each show is edited almost perfectly, focusing on the action that matters week-after-week without making it boring or routine. Producers put as much effort into filming and framing the 100th vinaigrette, ceviche or Beyoncé song[iii] as they do the first, and both shows have been rewarded with stellar ratings (on different scales, naturally) and recognition during awards season. However, for the past month or so, these two shows have been on my mind for an entirely different reason.
I’ve been thinking a lot about competition lately, most specifically about how predictability of results and reliability of results affect my enjoyment of specific sports. Put more plainly: “Do I like upsets and randomness in my sports?”
If you want to skip a few thousand words, I’ll answer this now: It turns out I don’t. I find sports that are rife with “great stories of David over Goliath” and “shocking miracles” tend to be highly populated by “idiocy,” “randomness” and “rules that break the game.” They also tend to affirm, because of their fickle nature, the worst traits in sports fans, including various levels of false idolatry, math-fear and, in some cases, xenophobia and racism.
Let me take a step back, though, and examine AI and TC, as my laziness dictates I call the television shows for the remainder of the article. Both shows have the same basic set-up: Start with a relatively large number of contestants, winnow it down quickly to a manageable number and then begin eliminating one at a time until you are left with a finale that people genuinely care about. However, each goes about this a different way.
TC sorts through videos sent in by professional chefs, as well as recommendations by established restaurateurs, and hand selects their top 17 “cheftestants.” Every episode has a Quickfire portion (which can reward the winner with immunity from elimination for the week, or with cooking-inspired prizes), followed by an Elimination Challenge. At the end of each episode, the judges select the best and the worst at performing in the Elimination Challenge, and send one individual home. The season’s finale pits either two or three of the chefs against each other, allowing them free reign in designing and executing an entire meal from start to finish.
AI, on the other hand, spends weeks televising the winnowing project, from thousands of applicants down to triple digits in Hollywood to 24 semi-finalists. Once the semi-finals begin, every performance is available to the viewing public and the public decides who leaves each week.[iv] Judges make comments on anything and everything, but ultimately, their only powers exist in (a) a one-time immunity to be used during the season for a contestant they think wrongfully ousted and (b) the effect their words have on the voting public.
Both shows take different tacks to the very same goal: find the best X in your pool of X’s. This, to me, is the heart of competition, and every part of a competition should advance this goal. There are other concerns (like expanding that pool of X’s, as an example), but when it comes down to it, I like sports, games and competitions that attempt to reward the most deserving, and don’t actively obfuscate what it means to be “the most deserving.”
I haven’t yet found a perfect competition in this regard, and it’s unlikely I ever will. Pure objectivity is a near impossibility in this world. But aspiring to perfection should not be too much to ask, and too many sports these days are plagued by arcane rules, elitist subjectivity, hidden (or open) corruption or simply poor product. Each of these flaws contributes to increased randomness, less reliable results and, to me at the very least, reduced enjoyment. The last two months have given us two perfect examples of competitions trending the wrong way.
Pretty Uninspiring, Eh?
Count me among the members of this site that hate the Winter Olympics. I don’t share Bill’s distaste for the pageantry and hypocrisy, if only because I don’t like the competitive aspects enough to warrant caring about the non-competitive aspects. No, the Winter Olympics is my sporting hell.
Sports with asinine rules? Check.
Sports with extremely subjective judging? Yup.
Sports with histories of corruption, and no actions taken? This too.
Sports that lack basic requirements of athleticism? YOU JUST GOT CURLED!
We can go through which of the sports is subjective/objective again, but it’s hardly worth it. There are 4 basic types of sports in the Olympics:
1.) Faster, Higher, Farther Sports determined objectively
2.) Faster, Higher, Farther Sports with a subjective judging element
3.) Entirely Subjectively Judged Sports
4.) Hockey and Curling
I have no issues with Numbers 1 or 4, except in very special cases (see below, under “Dumbest Sport that Has Ever Existed”). Curling is not an Olympic-level sport, but who cares? It’s fun to watch, easily ignored if you disagree and it replicates a game I can play in most any bar. If they had Olympic Pac-Man or Olympic Golden Tee, I imagine I’d watch that, too.
Numbers 2 and 3, however, cause problems. Most of these revolve around what I call the “Project Runway” issue.
“Project Runway” should, theoretically, appeal to my wife and me. It runs very much like Top Chef, the hosts are outstanding,[v] and the editing is as good as you might expect when a show about the fashion world is given plenty of time to cut, resize and restitch. But it suffers from a very basic flaw: I have no idea what underlying skills or rules I should be looking for. I simply am unable to tell who is a better contestant, or even what a preferable performance might have been.
There’s something very basic about TC and AI: They test skills that everyone, to one degree or another, understands. You may be tone deaf, or frequently burn your Hot Pocket,[vi] but you understand what good singing sounds like, or what good food tastes or looks like. There is a large portion of the population, however, that simply doesn’t understand the charm of a keyhole collar on a rainbow frock. Or whatever words Heidi is saying when I’m not listening to her.
It’s hard to judge how reliable the results of a competition are when you don’t, at the most basic level, understand the competition. There is a greater sense that you are being led along to a conclusion, rather than watching the conclusion play out fairly. Moreover, there’s always the tinge of doubt in your mind that the competition is on the up-and-up at all. After all, if I can’t tell the difference between house coats and kimonos, what are the chances I could suss out a fixed competition between people making them? And so I don’t watch “Project Runway.”
Many of the Winter Olympic sports have the same issue. I watched every single Ski Jumping event. I know that a jumper’s score is based mostly on the distance jumped with a small portion of the score based on judges’ observations and rankings. Because I’ve seen a meter stick, and fundamentally understand lengths and the measurement thereof, I can grasp the first aspect of the score. Because I’ve never jumped off a mountain with skis while trying to look pretty or land in a certain manner, and because no one has ever attempted to explain how one would even do that, I am clueless as to the second. Moreover, it’s not something you can really learn.
Even though I watched every jumping event, I could only come up with two guiding principles for the subjective portion of the event: if you fall, that’s probably not good for your score (or body), and if you jump 10 meters more than everyone else, it doesn’t much matter how you land. Other than that, I give up. I would routinely see a leg flail or a ski slide out of alignment and expect a terrible score, only to be surprised when high marks were returned. I would see seemingly perfect landings given horrible scores for what announcers claimed were “minor imperfections in form.” And Ski Jumping is the subjective sport least impacted by these kind of “Project Runway” issues.
If this were the worst crime of the Olympic Sports, snowy-variety, then it would be no big deal. It is, after all, a viewer-centric problem. I don’t understand the vagaries of Ski Jump or Triple Toe Loops….but I could. In fact, there are probably hundreds of people around the world that can watch an Olympic event and know exactly what is going on. And great for them. I applaud their richness and whiteness[vii] devotion to their sport. In the world of sports, the Winter Olympics may be “Project Runway,” but “Project Runway” is a pretty successful, even if I haven’t run out and learned to better appreciate fashion design.
No, the real problem with the Olympics as a whole is probably best viewed through the lens of one sport in particular, a competition I like to think of as:
The Dumbest Sport That Has Ever Existed
Short track speed skating is a bloodbath of idiocy. There are now eight versions of it officially recognized as Olympic events (men’s and women’s 500m, 1000m, 1500m and relays). All eight of them are ostensibly the same: Way more skaters than should be in an enclosed rink skate slowly around an oval until the final two or three laps, then everyone tries to kill each other with insanely sharp blades, aggressive passes and blocks, and a poor understanding of basic physics. Each race shares very similar strategies (“Should I be in FRONT of the fracas, or BEHIND?” “Should I kick my legs out when I inevitably fall, and hope that, in everyone falling, I can crawl to the finish line first?”), and only the relay really adds a new angle to the event. Of course, this “new angle” is the possibility that more than just the skaters currently participating will be injured or involved in a pileup, so take that for what it’s worth.
This year’s Games focused quite a bit on J.R. Celski, an American short track speed skater who ended up winning two bronzes. The reason behind the extra focus? Just a few months ago, during the Olympic Trials, he sliced his left leg so badly with his right skate (after sliding into the boards) that some thought he would bleed out on the ice. I’m not going to say this happens all the time…but I will say that it happens so frequently a skater can be disqualified for not covering every inch of skin on the body with fabric. Oh, and it also sort of happens all the time.
The crowning moment for the sport, however, as far as I am concerned, will always be the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City. After all, it’s not very often a relatively new (to the Olympics) sport creates a worldwide meme in the space of 5 minutes. But short track speed skating rose to the challenge, in the personage of one Steven Bradbury. Bradbury was an Australian, and actually quite good[viii] in 1994 and 1998. Both years, he came in as one of the favorites for a medal, but ‘twas not to be.[ix]
Enter 2002. Bradbury was past his prime, but still won his opening 1000m heat. However, his quarterfinal (which would send only the top two on to the semis) set him up against Apolo Anton Ohno[x] and Marc Gagnon. The former was on home ice, the latter was the reigning World Champion. Both finished ahead of the third-place Bradbury, seemingly consigning him to speed skating history. But then madness began. Gagnon was disqualified for having blocked the pass of another skater, putting Bradbury through to the semifinals.
Those semis saw Bradbury execute to complete perfection a distinct strategy of sucking. As he lingered well behind the front-runners, a disturbance at the front sent three of the semifinalists into a wall, allowing Bradbury to coast in as the second qualifier, a finalist in the most important race for a sport he openly admitted had passed him by. Reinforced by his semis “victory,” Bradbury took his tact further (and farther…behind, that is) in the finals. About 15 meters behind his four competitors with 50 to go, he had an excellent view of their collective group fail, and skated cleanly to a gold medal. In fact, he still holds the record for largest margin of victory in a short track race at the Olympics. “Pulling a Bradbury” became code for winning against long odds, with the connotation of said victory being undeserved.
Despite this being a hilarious example of why short track speed skating is the worst sport in the world, the story’s point wasn’t to mock. Its point was to introduce Steven Bradbury, and his 2002 Olympic gold medal.[xi] Because that gold medal, no matter how undeserved, was the first gold medal that anyone from the Southern Hemisphere had ever won in the Winter Olympics. Which brings me to the Winter Olympics’ greatest problem.
The Olympics are supposed to bring the best and the brightest from around the world and square them off against each other, deciding a world champion. In most sports (pretty much every sport I can think of except for soccer, actually), it’s the most important event in every four year period. There is a sense of universality about it, a sense that the Games present the world with an opportunity to come together, celebrate competition and share the stories and history well-known in one’s homeland with another, who returns the favor with stories and history of their own. Or at least that’s what the Summer Olympics are about.
After all, pretty much anyone can compete in a Summer Olympic sport. Very few of them require special weather conditions, expensive equipment or specific geographic features. There is no insurmountable disadvantage to being born poor when it comes to running long distances. Being from South of the Equator doesn’t disqualify you from playing soccer on the world stage. The best sprinter in the world comes from the most busted country I’ve ever visited.[xii]
The Winter Olympics, in contrast, are a party with a guest list. The bouncer makes sure you come from the Northern Hemisphere, have money for the finest equipment and training time, have had that money for most of your life and live within 7-8 geographic zones that house your very specialized sport. How is that fun? More importantly, how is that a WORLD competition?
I mentioned that I saw every Ski Jump event on television. This isn’t because I was naturally drawn to the Winter Olympics or, like my usual TV watching experience, an experiment in self-hatred where I watch shows I openly dislike.[xiii] Rather, I was vacationing in Jackson, Wyoming during the Olympics, and every store, bar, ski shop and restaurant in that town had at least one highly visible TV permanently glued on Olympics coverage. And yes, before you point out that taking a ski vacation in Jackson makes my castigation of the Winter Olympics as exclusionary and super-white a case of this pot and this kettle, I admit the hypocrisy. But that hypocrisy encapsulates my point: Worldwide competitions at their highest level shouldn’t be based on something I do recreationally, and which an unfair proportion of even this country’s population can’t afford.
I don’t think that every sporting event or competition needs to be all-inclusive, any more than I believe that every town in the country needs to be racially heterogeneous. My wife and I visited Jackson with her best friend and her best friend’s girlfriend. My wife’s best friend is half-Indian and her girlfriend is Sri Lankan. They comprised 40% of the non-Asian minority[xiv] we witnessed around the town and in the surrounding area. That’s just what Jackson is, for any number of demographic, socio-economic or geographic reasons. But it’s OK because Jackson doesn’t pretend to be anything else.
The Winter Olympics constantly sell themselves as inclusive, as the world’s sporting melting pot. It’s a lie, and an obvious one. The Winter Olympics is a collection of highly specialized sports enjoyed and excelled at by rich, mostly white people, and if they were taken as such, I would be completely fine with them. I could ignore them without social repercussions.[xv] But instead, I’m sold their importance on two underlying falsities: that the individual sport I’m watching matters to the world as a whole and not just the Euro-American countries; and that the individual sport I’m watching even makes sense. The first is the larger problem, though the second makes it far easier to hate.
I’ve spent 3,000 words on this already, so I’m going to split the article (which was previously two articles) back into two pieces. But two different pieces than existed before. I can’t promise I will finish the second half in a timely manner, as I’m hosting my wife’s parents this weekend. But a short preview:
College basketball sucks.
ENJOY!
[i] I may have made this show up. Actually, it’s more that I hope I made this show up.
[ii] There are others actually. We both enjoy House and Scrubs, for instance, despite the clear decline that each is going through. I didn’t write about them because they don’t have anything to do with the rest of the article. Sue me.
[iii] Every Beyoncé album exists solely as proof that an attractive woman who can’t sing is much more marketable than a large woman who can. Nearly every year, there are at least 1-2 girls on American Idol who will just DESTROY (in a good way) a Beyoncé song, without the benefits of a studio fix, special audio equipment or more than a week of preparation. Yet B may very well go down as my generation’s best-selling artist. Or at least most popular. Terrible, America. Terrible.
[iv] Another difference: AI is live (for the most part) once the semi-finals begin, so talk of “weeks” and “episodes” are interchangeable. TC is decidedly NOT live, which helps in editing and production value, but is also possible because it contains no public input.
[v] And outstanding to look at. Tim Gunn Heidi Klum is tasty!
[vi] Said in Jim Gaffigan voice, naturally.
[vii] I’ll save this for later.
[viii] As “good” as one can be in a sport characterized by randomness and luck more than anything else.
[ix] Bradbury actually had a more serious “Celski” moment in a 1994 World Cup race, where a competitor’s skate went ENTIRELY THROUGH his leg. He lost poop-tons of blood and required 111 stitches.
[x] This is a rant for another day, but I hate Ohno. He’s pompous, immature and the focus on him being the most decorated American skater is a farce, considering how far behind the domination of Bonnie Blair and Eric Heiden he is.
[xi] And to mock…the point is ALWAYS to mock. But not the MAIN point.
[xii] That’s actually a lie. It’s possible that Martinique is more busted than Jamaica. I’ll have to think on it. Jamaica had guys with M1’s defending liquor stores. Martinique had guys openly urinating on the street and then going back to selling their street food. Close call.
[xiii] Paging Lost on Aisle 7….Lost? Aisle 7!
[xiv] Yes, India and Sri Lanka are both considered Asian in some areas, but I’m excluding only non-SubContinent Asians from the minority count here. If we count the other way, there were only 3 non-Asian minorities.
[xv] The exasperation that people project when I tell them I haven’t seen a specific Olympic event, or that I am uninterested in a certain outcome is beyond me. Or it would be if I didn’t feel that same exasperation every time I tried talking baseball with someone.