Suggested Olympic Tweaks by Sport

 

Surfing-The idea of making the Olympics more groovy through the addition of surfing culture is pretty solid. I’m sure we can find some great Jeff Spicolo types to do for the Summer Olympics what Shaun White or Chloe Kim do for the Winter games. The problem is how do you control Mother Nature? Does everyone get the same size waves? It also looks indiscernible to the layman what the difference between winning and losing looks like. It seems like everyone stays afloat for a few seconds and crashes. Honestly, the scoring seems as arbitrary as that episode of Batman where the Joker challenges Batman to a surf-off.

Weightlifting-No offense, but I’ve never been that impressed with the people who just brag about how much they can bench. I didn’t get a chance to see this one, but is that all this sport is? If so, this seems more like a supplement to a Jersey Shore reality show rather than something I want to see in the Olympics. Besides, I’m guessing there are only two things that happen: You either can or can’t lift the bar bell. Where’s the drama in that?

Photo by Vladimir Fedotov on Unsplash

Marathon Swim-Yes, it’s super-admirable to swim 10km out in the open ocean. But for god’s sakes, don’t put the entirety of the 10 km on TV. With the exception of the last 500 meters, every point in the race looks like every other point in the race. If anything, the picturesque sight of these swimmers traversing the open ocean is photographic is better suited as a photographic screensaver than video form. Maybe just have them pose for a photo shoot and put them on a water taxi bound towards the end of Tokyo harbor and have them duke it out at the end. No one will know the difference.

Decathlon/Heptathlon-The winner of this is event is considered the world’s best athlete but in reality, the event is mostly about achieving mediocrity across the board. The athletes’ marks in each event are generally what would get them a walk-on spot on a mid-major Division I team. So for starters, let’s ease up on the hype.

The other problem is that each event is looong with a capital L-O-O-O-O-N-G. Why go through a full high jump and full pole vault competition? This means you’re watching 25ish competitors find the Goldilocks distance where it’s not too easy but not too hard to jump over the bar. Why six javelin throws. I get that it’s exciting to exhaust the competitors so that they hobble through a mile at the end so that they’re times are comparable to DIII walk-ons, but let’s not exhaust the audience.

Shotput- Is it me or is the competitor getting a hickey from a steel bowling ball? I feel like this event was just the beta testing for all the cooler things we could throw (i.e. large steel yo-yos, steel frisbees, spears). Maybe we can replace the shotput with something cooler like a watermelon (and smash it a la Gallagher) or axes?

Fencing-it’s a moderately exciting sport but shouldn’t style matter? The competitors look like they’re fighting for scraps of garbage on the version of Earth that Wall-E takes place in? Instead of dressing up like 22nd century microwave meals, why not cosplay like Musketeers?

Mountain Biking-Love this sport. In fact, I even watched about 50 minutes of the replay on Peacock. However, it’s kind of odd that when a biker gets a flat tire or something else is wrong with the bike, they just sit there and pout while waiting for a replacement or I don’t know what they’re doing. Can we have a spare bike or pit crew?

Photo by Valerie Fomina on Unsplash

Equestrian-The only thing that can be done with horses that closely resembles sport is racing those horses against each other. Traditionally, when that happens the jockeys are tiny and the horses get the credit. Did equestrian form so that the big boys and girls could play with horses in a competitive way and not have to go fast?

Trampoline-Yes, it’s fun to jump on a trampoline but there’s no way this isn’t gymnastic’s bastard cousin. In gymnastics, you have to prove yourself capable of flipping, holding yourself up with massive upper body strength, and artistic routine, timing your movement and landing so that — God forbid — your feet don’t move. In trampoline, you just jump with childish glee. You don’t even have to dismount or land properly. It’s almost if the judge is paying as much attention as a teenage lifeguard at the Ramada Inn.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Archery-I was excited to see this before I realized it was people doing the same thing over and over and over. Just add a little variety and I think you’ll see some results. The basics are moving the target but, hey, this is a humor article, so I’m not in the business of sensible ideas. How about: 1) Giving your opponent liberty to distract you three times a match 2) Having a dry round, a tipsy round, and a blackout drunk round 3) Offering free drinks if you can finish all your arrows in under two minutes 4) Shooting an apple off a loved one’s head to break a dead heat (although the Swiss might run away with that one)

Synchronized Swimming-You would think this is an easy target for a humor article, but I actually didn’t find much wrong with this at all. It’s one of the most ridiculous combinations of things — being underwater and group dancing — -but somehow it works.

Photo by Jonathan Chng on Unsplash

Track and Field (All women’s events)-I kind of understand the spirit of wearing a bathing suit in beach volleyball. However, It simply can’t be comfortable running in your underwear. Are women, coaches, and the sport collectively ok with this?

Mixed 4 X 4 Relay-Do we have to keep finding ways to reward sprinters with more events? This is just plain unimaginative. We know it’s the same thing. If you’re going to add something, distance medley relays are often the most exciting event in track or even a sprint medley relay.

Field Hockey-This sport gets a thumbs up from me but it surprisingly has the same problem as ice hockey which is I often can’t see the ball. This also has a reverse problem of penalties as soccer does. As opposed to soccer which goes into penalties too often on account of low scores, penalties truly are a last ditch resort as the scores are generally higher. The problem is that unlike soccer, the penalties are twice as exciting as the field play. As a result, we need to amp up the level of excitement in regular time so we’re not rooting for penalties.

Race Walking-I’ll give credit to this sport for the charming 1966 film “Walk Don’t Run”, but this is what 70-year-olds do at a retirement community when they’re trying to get to the early bird special. In no way, shape, or form is this remotely a dignified way to earn a gold medal. Considering, it’s not contested on the professional track circuit or the NCAAs why haven’t the Olympics wised up and dropped this event?

Six More Stories Behind the Stories

 

1. Savannah Connect Magazine- An ordinary art student with an interesting major https://lnkd.in/dPrz99n

This is a story for Savannah Connect—an alternative weekly in Georgia’s second biggest city-- about a college senior and her first professional art exhibit. My relationship with Savannah Connect is one in which I don’t have any choice over what I report. The stories I get are pretty standard. In this case, for instance, there wasn’t a lot I could initially discern on the surface about why this one artist is different than any other artist being featured in a gallery. It’s more of a challenge in Savannah because the city’s youth scene is dominated by alumni and students of the Savannah College of Art and Design.

So the challenge on me is often to take a pretty ordinary story and spruce it up. Oftentimes, I discover the angles I want to take along the way as I’m having the conversation. In this case, I thought her relationship with her father and her unusually transient childhood (she was born to 19-year-old college freshmen and lived in student housing) were interesting points. More importantly, she was actually not a traditional major of art but rather sequential design which is the study of making comic books. That was something I never heard about which meant I was onto something. The story had to be about her current paintings so I had to strike a balance 2. Podium Magazine- Perennial Fourth Place Finisher Achieves His Dream and Mysteriously Retires Before Olympics

https://lnkd.in/dkCEgMj This is one of the story's I'm most proud of this year. Andy Bayer was the unlucky 4th place finisher at both the 2012 and 2016 Olympic trials and finished 4th in two world champion trials, before finally making the team in 2019. This year, as his shoe company dropped his contract, he decided to retire right before the Olympic trials despite a high world ranking. I previously asked a quote from him for a story so I decided why not contact him and ask why he retired and maybe that’s a fascinating story. The story eventually got approved by podium magazine I love track and field, this was a joy but also because a retired athlete is WAY better to interview than an active athlete. No answers have to be softened to appease a coach, teammate, or PR company. It also helped that I ran track and watched it quite a lot, so I was able to talk shop with him with a lot more intimacy.

3. Zebra Magazine- Opening of Reagan National Airport’s New Terminal Feels Like an Ordinary Tuesday to Most This article happened because I heard about an event after it happened. My parents volunteer at Washington Reagan National Airport and they called me one day to tell me that members of the press were having a tour of the new terminal. I had just read an article about the significance of this new terminal by Dan Zak of the Washington Post: DCA airport's infamous Gate 35X is gone but not forgiven. Briefly, the story goes like this: In 1997, when the new DCA terminal came to be, there were plans to build a terminal for smaller regional planes that never came to fruition so far 24 years, passengers for those flights had to endure a crammed shuttle and long wait out on the tarmac. “Gate 35X didn’t qualify as a municipal quirk, like Washington’s lack of a J Street. Gate 35X was just a bus station. In an airport…..Even worse, these indignities weren’t bifurcated by class. On Capitol Hill, that upper class includes several congressmen whose home districts fall in those geographical cracks between the urban centers that are only served by regional routes. Congressmen weren’t the only wealthy people to feel the discomfort, but they did have a national microphone to air their grievances which is how Gate 35X got upheld as the epitome of air travel failure in congressional hearings,” wrote Zak in the aforementioned article.

So when I got a call, I thought this is a great idea. However, I got there too late. Still, the tour was done 3 days before the grand opening so I decided to pitch a scene piece where I’d report on opening day. I started a dialogue with an editor I had worked with before at Zebra Magazine. She was interested but we had to negotiate whether this was on spec (not guaranteed publication) and while I had the support of the media relations team behind the airport, they were unwilling to give me a first-hand tour. The article was also complicated by a partially true concern over whether people (most importantly, airline and airport employees) were willing to go on the record (newspapers traditionally like first and last names). I think scene pieces (a cross between traditional reporting and a tone poem describing a time and place) can generally be a whole other level of writing when done right. But there was some definite concern over this one. Fortunately the interweaving of Dan Zak’s wonderful article, statistics provided by the media team, and knowledge of a flight that was delayed and my observations and quotes gave an article that my editor was really pleased with.

4. Today I Found Out.com - The United States' First Trip to the Olympics

Since watching the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, I’ve always been an enthusiast for the games. In fact I’m simultaneously excited for the Tokyo Olympics and dreading just how much my schedule will be upended by being glued to the television.

I did a number of pieces on the 2012 Olympics for Mental Floss after catching and pitching the editor on Twitter and that opened the door for this article for the 2016 Olympics on the very first US delegation to the inaugural Olympic Games in Athens in 1896. I’ve recently started to love deep historic research and a lot of times, I think back to a specific source of mine rather than just blindly google. In this case, there was a fascinating book I read years before I pitched the article at my local library. Because my local library didn’t carry it, I went to the Library of Congress reading room or as it is better known the Hogwarts of D.C.

 

 

5. Falls Church News Press- Apartment Safety Procedures Throughout Pandemic Has Limited Lifestyle Benefits

https://www.fcnp.com/2021/04/16/apartment-safety-procedures-throughout-pandemic-has-limited-lifestyles-benefits/ This article is a pretty weak product by any standard and I’m actually pretty proud of it. The reason is that while I consider journalism to be art, that doesn’t mean journalism doesn’t have constraints that a good journalist must abide by. Journalism isn’t novel writing or poetry. There’s an industrial component to it and it’s absolutely essential to the profession that something has to be produced by a deadline. Oftentimes, I make the mistake of treating every article I write like it must be held to a certain standard of quality when that is simply not necessary from the perspective of my editor who simply needs to fill some space with certain articles. When push comes to shove, sometimes it’s necessary to shut off the off the “I have to make this good” part of my brain if the deadline is approaching.

This is what happened on a Tuesday when both an initial assignment idea and a back-up assignment fell apart. The editor and I put our heads together and thought of something that was passable so that we could fill half a page and legitimately fulfill the promise to the paper’s advertisers of having real-estate related content (not something we ordinarily do). And trust me, racing around town and trying to find anyone to go on record within a five or six hour period, while not desirable, was an adrenaline rush. 6 The DC Line-Swimply Pool App

I read an article somewhere on a tech blog about a pool sharing app that worked like Uber in the way that the app facilitated the rental of pools as a third party. My article was written at the height of Summer in the pandemic so I felt as if I was vicariously living through the lives of Swimply users who got to explore the luxury of different pools as swimming access was so scarce. Although I did many interviews for this article, I greatly enjoyed my interview with the company founder because he did a really good job explaining the simplicity of his idea and its execution. He used Google Earth to look up backyard pools in the suburbs of Long Island and knocked on several doors to ask if the owners of those pools would be interested in renting out their pools through a new pilot app. Hundreds slammed the door on him but he had four takers and that’s all it took to start his business. Talk about entrepreneurship.