John Hattaway

I’ve been watching the Olympics. Not to the extent that I am glued to it, but I flip back and forth between NBC and whatever else is on. So, I am watching it, and I am glued to the T.V. during my favorite sports, namely volleyball, and specifically women’s beach volleyball. This is a sport I can watch frequently, and I hope that it has less to do with the women and more to do with the sport – as volleyball is also the only sport that I really enjoy playing.

Given that, I am tired of watching the United States win at most things. I know that we are the odds on favorites for most sports because we can throw money and people at them until we are the best, the most scientific, the most engineered, the most ready to go to an amateur event and win; but to constantly have the United States National Anthem playing, over and over again has got to be one of the most embarrassing things anyone can listen to. Imagine the host country just wishing, just hoping, that their team will get a gold somewhere just to hear their anthem played; imagine those kids in some obscure nation that want their athletes to win, and in the end you can imagine what it must be like to watch the same team win over and over again.

I do understand that people will tell you it’s the honor of going that is important, not the act of winning. If that were true, if that were really true, then we wouldn’t dump tens and hundreds of millions of dollars a year into athletes to train them and focus them on winning in their competitions. We would not spend $700 million dollars to broadcast the Olympics. The whole event, though important for national pride, would not be so overwhelming as to require the amount of attention that we throw at it.

Don’t get me wrong, I want to see our people win. I want to see our athletes be the best of the best; but at the same time, I want the competition to be even. I would love to watch truly amateur athletes compete head to head where someone from Zimbabwe had a chance of winning, or someone from Madagascar, or someone from some third world country who had trained hard, saved everything, worked a job, and dedicated his, or her, entire life to going to the Olympics. That is what I am impressed by. That, of all things, is what I want to see.

Go U.S.A. but more, Go World.

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