Jill Murray
So I guess it’s an Olympic year coming up.
The Royal Bank has trumped up their own version of a Heritage Moment, celebrating their own financial investment in Olympic hockey, and the Torontoist had a Kurt Browning sighting last week, around the time of the Drunken Ashley Simpson McDonalds debacle. (OK, maybe Toronto isn’t that boring all of the time. I’m sorry I said that.) All of this can only mean one thing: our troops are getting ready to suit up in their Roots finest and board the big boat to Turin. (Have you checked out the web site for the Turin Olympics? The mascots this year are ice-cube heads, and they’re really, really happy.)
That’s all well and good, but I think it’s time for a new format. As long as Americans are just obnoxious warfaring baseball lovers, and Canadians are polite and hockey mad, and Australians are nothing but redneck rugby players, and the English are drunk on football hooliganism, and Japan is only good at the sports it invents that no one else understand and so forth, we should have a World athletic forum that gives more equal and accurate representation to our most closely held shallow athletic sterotypes.
Let’s call a spade a spade and admit that no one’s really looking for Jamaican bobsledders or English ski jumpers, or for Canadians to do much of anything other than paddle in the summer.
What we really need is an arena, field, or platform on which our international teams can meet on their own terms. I want to line a rugby team up against a hockey team, and let the betting begin. Who will win? One team has virtually no rules… The other has sticks. Or how about soccer-baseball? We used to play that all the time in elementary school. I can hear the Heritage Moment being written now.
That’s the only fantasy sports league I’m looking to dream about.
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Actually, I think that’s the IOC site for Torino. The official one is http://www.torino2006.org/ – you can also check out the ParaGames site at http://www.paralympicgames.torino2006.org/eng/ which features Aster the Snowflake, who doesn’t look like the other mascots at all, other than being very happy. (The icecube heads are Neve and Gliz).
In other Olympic news, I haven’t heard yet if they’ve settled the anti-anti-doping issue. It turns out there are laws in Italy that mean anyone caught doping at Torino could end up serving jail time. The IOC is a bit concerned, since it usually only gives out suspensions and the like… I dunno though. Might make for a clean Games for a change.
Also, the Norwegian sweaters they have in the Olympic store are very very nice. I saw their shop in Salt Lake. They are also very very expensive.
Owwwww.
Lime green menu bar. What were they thinking?