COMPETITIVE DIVING HUMOR
- For as much as I complain about gymnastics, I actually don’t mind watching it in the Olympics.
I could have gone without coverage of the gymnastics gala, or whatever it was called, where all the medallists did the same routines they did in the real competition, except this time it was set to music that never seemed to be in synch with the actual exercise. But I digress.
Once every four years I can sit through a few nights of tumbling, twisting and stuck landings as long as there are some medals on the line. My patience doesn’t extend to gymnastics distant, in-bred cousin: diving.
Q: What kind of people are divers?
A: Unathletic people and a**holes. In my county, high-school swimming is, for some reason, combined with diving. I fear that this is not an isolated situation. Why is this so… because both take place in a pool?
What? I don’t see volleyball and basketball teams combining forces on a single team just because they both play on hardwood floors.
Yet, the swim team had to let divers on it and, worst of all, had to watch it during the meets.
If you haven’t seen a dive meet, let me sum up: Diver jumps off board after 30 seconds of concentrating. Scores given after 30 seconds deliberation (“Should I give it a 5.5 or a 6.0. Were the toes pointed correctly? Was the flip in line with the board? Was there good body control? How am I supposed to remember all of this, the whole dive took about .8 seconds.”) Repeat 44 times.
Swimmers who worked hard year-round, swimming mile upon mile, lifting weights and practicing at the crack of dawn actually had to take a break in the middle of their meet to watch people cut from J.V. volleyball attempt front flips with a half-twist.
What a joke. I sometimes can still hear the judge’s scores in my nightmares. Anybody can be a good diver. Well, anybody except somebody with a hint of athletic ability, because those people would be competing in a real sport and not wasting their time jumping off a board and trying not to make splash.
Seriously how not fun is that. The main joy of jumping off a diving board is seeing how big a splash you can make. Diving sucks the fun out of that and does the opposite. It’s like having a race and seeing who can go the slowest.
Simply put: diving is for losers.
Chris, can you really make a sweeping generalization of an entire sport like that?
Yes. Yes I can. Why? Because it’s diving.
The good news is, the Americans were shut out of medals at the Olympics in diving for the first time since 1912. Hopefully, this will mean that NBC will not devote hours of primetime coverage to this non-sport in Beijing. One can only hope.
- That’s it for today. I gotta run… Need to be at diving practice in 20 minutes.
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