The Olympics are Over… Finally!

My belief is if you feel you have to apologize before saying something then you shouldn’t say it.

Having said that, I’m Olympic’d out and I didn’t watch any of the coverage and I’m glad the whole thing is over My thoughts have nothing to do with the events – although I do wonder why we can go gaga over stuff like track and field and swimming for a week (and rightfully so, that’s good stuff) and then not show much of an interest in those competitions for another four years – and it has nothing to do with the athletes. No, my thoughts about the Games are pretty much all personal. Because of things happening on the home front I just couldn’t get interested in any of them, and my thoughts over the International Olympic Committee stubbornly refusing to hold a simple moment of silence to commemorate the 40^th anniversary of the 1972 murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich games just left me with a foul taste in my mouth and a very simple decision to make which was not to watch the games.

The decision by the IOC was met with anger by many, myself included, but one group was happy with the decision not to give a mere 60 seconds of the opening ceremonies to an event that could be called a defining moment of the 20^th century, and that was the Palestinian delegation to the Olympics. That group was very happy with the decision and as head of the Palestinian Olympic Committee, Jibril Rajoub, wrote, any show of solidarity with the 11 victims of the 1972 massacre by the IOC would constitute, “racism”. His belief is that the Games are a method for spreading love and as such they should not be used for divisiveness. I’m sorry. That sound you just heard? It was me vomiting.

The Games are a method for spreading love and should not be used for divisiveness. Odd words from a person from a Palestinian. The same ‘country’ that gave us the Yasser Arafat-approved plan that sent eight terrorists hiding behind the name, “Black September” to the 1972 games where they would disguise themselves as athletes and carry their assault rifles in their equipment bags and enter the Olympic Village only to hold Israeli athletes hostage while demanding the release of 200+ Palestinian terrorists sitting in Israeli jails. Thankfully, and I know that sounds odd considering how the hostage-taking ended, Israel doesn’t negotiate with terrorists.

Yes, we all know how it ended. Negotiations between the German police and the terrorists were unsuccessful and 11 Israeli athletes went from being young and full of hope for the time at the Munich Games and being full of that spreading love and not being divisive thing to being hostages to a group of PLO-sponsored terrorists to being dead.

And we can’t give their memories a minute of Olympic Games time. Forty years later and the Games can’t observe a moment of silence to remember the lives of 11 innocents who lost their lives. Forty years later and the Palestinians still can’t recognize the importance of peace.

That was a very long way to say that my reaction to that foul taste in my mouth was to organize my own little one-person boycott. The Games went on as scheduled a – as they should have – and they were successful and I was successful, too.

I started this out by saying if a person has to apologize before saying something then they probably have no business saying it and I believe that which is why I shouldn’t say what I’m about to say.

Handball?

Seriously, handball?

I’m on the fence with ping pong, but handball?

I’d sooner watch the return of Olympic Tug of War or the Plunge for Distance.

And speaking of Olympic sports I find less than thrilling, what’s the deal with the men’s basketball team? I know there used to be a time when the Olympic team had to be made up of amateurs and then a rule change in the 80’s changed that and allowed teams to include professionals, but this all-pro, all-star team seem to pretty much dominate the field so outside of watching an NBA all-star team compete together over something like eight games, I don’t get what’s so exciting about them.

I did watch some of the closing ceremonies because I wanted to see The Who and I’m getting that feeling that I should be apologizing so I’m going to stop now.