Every four years, much of the world pauses and we watch incredible feats of human ability. Millions tune in, medals are won, records are broken, and then life resumes more or less unchanged.
And yet, the Olympics don’t seem to carry the same cultural authority they once did. Is it about excellence, ritual, shared attention, or just a very expensive tradition we haven’t quite figured out how to let go of yet?
What do you think?
I feel like battle of the bands should be in the Olympics.
I hope we never let it go. Yes it seems less important to people today, that’s okay, not everyone has to care, but I think we’d lose something important as a world of people if we stopped doing it. It’s a competition that’s somehow unifying. We all get together and act civilised for once - far more civilised than any crap that might happen at a UN meeting. There’s sportsmanship, respectful rivalries, camaraderie - and sure there’s the occasional cheating but we’re only human after all.
Let’s not get rid of it. Even if only 5 people watch it, let’s keep going.
I don’t actually think it’s anywhere near unpopular enough to even consider getting rid of it though.
Leftists want Trannies in the Olympics and can’t define what a Woman is…
So yes Olympics is irrelevant at this point. Anybody with common sense would turn it off:
Funniest thing I’ve ever seen 
If anything this proves the Olympics is still relevant. That woman was so god awful, she shot the Olympics back into the spotlight for everyone scrolling the internet looking at memes.
Other than her, the other breakdancers, particularly the men, were astoundingly athletic. Every Olympics hosts one or two “experimental competitions”, events which aren’t usually hosted that they want to try out. I think that’s a good thing.
I still like watching the Olympics on television occasionally.
Any kind of fighting I’d have a brief passing interest in but no interest in the other competitive events. I personally can’t imagine how anyone could have a life with few enough problems so that their brains could be occupied and satiated by watching men race around a track or run around with some variety of ball. In fact, I’m almost insulted that i should share a world with such dull and uneventful people. Then there’s the worst if it; the masculinity that hypercommodified male consumers try to obtain by doing arbitrary competitive things. If he can’t beat somebody up to impress the guys and get Marcy in bed, maybe he’ll just throw a ball through a hoop more times than some other guys and get their admiration and approval that way. The simulation of masculinity in a world divided between a bourgeoise class trying to feel manly and valuable for some other reason than their money (the wealthy gym bourgeoisie go through this crisis, for instance) and a broke and impotent working class that can’t express their competitive spirit through acts of violence against the State… so end up being quarterbacks and hockey goalies to get it all out. This is the short way of saying if you have enough energy to run down a field with a ball every day for a year, you have enough energy to smash, crash, and burn shit. And if you aren’t, you’re a pussy, a masochistic imbecile, or both (in the latter, i mean. Not the former. For the bourgeoisie the masculine competitive spirit can only be expressed vicariously through a gym membership, at stoplights in corvettes, or at bars in front of rich friends like that fag that got his ass handed to em by my good dude Will Hunting. Never could it be a sublimation of revolutionary force and spirit for that would be suicidal).
Oh! My point. Athletic competition is good entertainment in a Marxist world but nowhere else. Anywhere else, it is the commodified, marketed, and sublimated aggressive energy of an impotent and distracted class for the purposes of profit and pacification (when kids have athletes as idols they’re less likely to become criminals and anarchists that threaten the State).
I’d like to see them, even for a single year only, return to the original Greek games and follow all the original rules:
All athletes competed naked
Wrestlers and pankration (a sort of mixed martial art which combined boxing and wrestling) competitors fought covered in oil
Corporal punishment awaited those guilty of a false start on the track
There were only two rules in the pankration – no biting and no gouging
Boxers were urged to avoid attacking the on-display male genitals
There were no points, no time limits and no weight classifications in the boxing
Athletes in the combat sports had to indicate their surrender by raising their index fingers – at times they died before they could do this
Boxers who could not be separated could opt for klimax, a system whereby one fighter was granted a free hit and then vice-versa – a toss of a coin decided who went first
Obviously, in the interests of gender equality, all of the above would apply to female athletes as well, who could compete in all events.
Good / bad idea?
I genuinely think the whole world would be watching. People would call in sick to work, ratings would go through the roof.
Would certainly make it all relevant again.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There were no female competitors so you are safe with your homoerotic sexual fantasies.
I’m aware of that Vic. It was part of the joke.
You take everything very literally, Vic.
You are very butthurt, Vic.
That would be you , Niall. You must be American 
Well apart from the obvious homoeroticism, this is the part that interests me the most, and I think it could be achieved by giving the guy with the starter’s pistol, an actual pistol.
I am starting to sound that way.
