Category Archives: sports

The Summer Olympics Enchant Us – Especially Now

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My family, as perhaps yours, was always glued to the TV the entire Olympics. It brought our family together. The theme music sent us sprinting to the living room. Takashi Ono, Muhammad Ali, Larisa Latynina, Peggy Fleming, Dorothy Hamill, Katarina Witt, Mark Spitz, Carl Lewis, and – perhaps most charmingly of all – Nadia Comaneci, blew the world’s collective mind. 

In 2000, the Olympic Committee’s slogan was The Joy Unites Us. Coke’s current ad campaign is: “It’s magic when the world comes together.” I do hope that these are both true, and happening. I admit I entered this 33rd Olympiad in a jaded state. The world has gone cuckoo. I miss the (innocent!) Russian gymnasts, and the Refugee Olympic Team breaks my heart conceptually … but, man, it has all turned out exciting. 

Summer has 329 events, 32 sports (winter has 15). Daytime and weekends are the best time to watch. At night, NBC seems to think Americans only want to hear about Americans. Well sure, NBC’s viewers are mainly American, but in the past, we got far more background on athletes of all the Lands. Now it’s all “USA! USA! USA!” 

I love Simone Biles and other remarkable American contenders as much as anyone, but surely there are “foreign” athletes that have overcome adversity whose stories are worth telling? And we’d like to learn more, maybe, about the host nation’s athletes?

As a sports fan I’m a perpetual underdogger, beyond thrilled, for example, when the Netherlands, Kenya, Ukraine (Mahuchinkh in her sleeping bag between high jumps!), and the tiny Caribbean nation of St. Lucia strike gold in track and field, Algeria in uneven bars, or Armenia medals on vault. Refugee team member Simone Ngamba of Camaroon with at least a bronze in boxing: I wept. 

The point of The Joy Unites Us, the best slogan ever, was the jubilance on the beaming faces of medaling athletes of any nation whatsoever, captivating and connecting an entire globe. It wasn’t about the largest countries with the most athletes and biggest pocketbooks to train them. 

Seeing Greece’s and Ireland’s absolute elation at capturing bronze (rings; swimming), and (especially underdog) winning athletes and coaches from around the globe crying freely, Djokovic full-out sobbing … that’s what it’s about for me. I panic whenever someone falls off a device, wipes out, trips, disqualifies, loses a medal last-minute due to the judges’ gaffe (what?!), or blows a dive, after years of training. That’s sorrow, an empathetic sorrow. But when NBC shows us a team celebrating the low score of another country’s athlete because it means they just went up a notch themselves, I want to turn the TV off.

Yet mostly, as ever, I’m bawling. United in joy with humans planet-wide! Many things remain the same. The butterfly stroke still boggles. The insane balance beam, rings, vault, pommel horse, bike racing, and hurdles still terrify. 

Newer events astound. Surfing, skateboarding: yipes. I dug the Mixed Relays in track and swimming. In track, it’s men vs. men and women vs. women for each leg; in swimming it’s anyone’s choice for each leg. Please know I don’t consider women superior to men, but how amazing to see women best men in any race at all. I’ve seen no broadcast of Breaking or Canoe Slalom. I guess that’s why God invented YouTube.

Mercifully, there is way less Beach Volleyball this year, which felt like an endless broadcast of women in microkinis, when there are dozens of other competitions going on.

So watch the athletes put the final pedals to the medals and pour on the gas, with much drama remaining. You just might feel something in that place where your heart used to be. Closing Ceremonies on Sunday. Next up: the Paralympics. Riveting!

Good Olympics, good Paralympics, and good day.

Ann Aikens’ book of advice, A Young Woman’s Guide to Life: A Cautionary Tale, is at Amazon & Vermont shops. She has written her Upper Valley Girl column since 1996. Find shops & events at annaikens.com; more of her writing at uppervalleygirl.com.

The Degree of Difficulty and The Flip Side of Everything

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Golden Class reunion nuggetWhen I’m not puzzling about our political climate, pondering which mosquito-borne illness is most likely at a particular time of day (West Nile by night; Zika and dengue by day) or fretting about The Really Big One, I’m contemplating the flip side of everything for dear Reader. And as I peripatetically examine Vermont’s many splendours, I collect observations and nuggets of solid gold for your reading pleasure in our dark modern tymes.

Such as this gem during a holiday weekend, from a doctor I met lakeside: “My research is online. Google me.” I’ve never heard the verb Google with me as the object of the verb – brilliant! Let’s say it a lot. The world is a mess. We could use the laffs.

The Olympics upon us, I am unable to wax desperate about world affairs. The sweat of many nations* diverts us, joyfully. From the opening ceremony to the first “On your mark!” to the extinguishing of the torch, we are riveted by the athletes’ discipline, costumes, and youth.

opening arenaObservation: when I started watching the Olympics (first televised in the US in 1960) in 1968, the athletes were all older then I. Now they’re all younger. Much. And very different from me. As the official slogan for the first Olympic and Paralympic Games in South America says: A New World. A new world I can no more fathom than I can navigate. The technology alone…there are many, many things now beyond our control. With everything from the car to the toaster computerized, we can’t fix anything that’s busted. Our children and grandchildren know more than we do, for the first time in the history of the world. We’re in a weird place because of it. I’m pretty sure that when we were kids, everything was our fault. We were in the way, we were noisy, we broke things, we cost a lot. Now, as adults, everything is our fault. We destroyed the planet etc. etc.

A term we non-Olympians hear only every 2 years is Degree of Difficulty. As my father would agree, the Degree of Difficulty in just plain living has greatly increased in our part of the world in recent years. We are assaulted by information and images of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, and exposed to waves and rays of all kinds. There is too much bad news televised, too many climatic disasters, too much violence and economic upheaval boggling our beans — and that’s not counting the disappearance of products we loved, the prevalence of fakely famous “celebrities,” and horrible fashion trends. No wonder we can’t sleep.

caldronCan’t sleep? Hell, stay up till midnight every single night watching the O’s. It’s where the degree of difficulty is measurable and finite, unlike in the rest of life. It’s the only place you’ll hear caldron in a non-pagan setting, the term aquatic stadium, and podium as a verb, e.g., ”I plan to podium.”

When life’s degree of difficulty proves too much and you hit the wall, achieving the unfortunate state that psychologists call learned helplessness, just pack it in. Leave the dishes in the sink, the bills unpaid, kick up your feet, and turn on the tube. Gaze at the beautiful youth of earth’s many Lands with their crazy-good feats and grace and energy, with compelling close-ups of their unashamed thrills of victory and agonies of defeat.

And the sounds! The parallel bars. The diving board. The thwaks and panting. The excited sportscasting and cheering of the fans will rouse you. You’ll see people going absolutely nuts because they won the bronze. And with today’s high def TVs, you’ll feel like you’re cycling right along with them, swimming underneath them, vaulting through the air alongside them, or falling off the balance beam despite your finest efforts. It’s like when Bugs Bunny was chasing the mechanical rabbit lure at the dog track. You are right there with them. It’s virtual reality and it sure feels good. We have to take advantage of what slim benefits Modern Tymes offer, indeed.

o-MAN-BUN-facebookNot into sport? Volunteer or hang out with the YP’s.** Despite the hideosity of the man bun, with its possibly samurai provenance, and their disinterest in anything awkward or random***, the YPs are lovely beings of light, so polite and “Howzitgoing?” and “Tell me what’s good!” and “You’re fine.” With them, bigotry and bias and dependence upon fossil fuels will vanish. Miraculous inventions and ways of thinking will solve climate change, restore the polar ice cap, correct water problems, feed the world, and repopulate vanishing species.

bronzeBut for now, dear Reader, give up. Recline on the couch and win the bronze. Leave the future to the YPs. Google yourself silly. Everything will be okay. Good vaulting and good day.

 Bonus observations

DON’T TRY TO GET PEOPLE TO DO STUFF THEY DON’T WANT TO

It’s like throwing water on a grease fire.

SOMEONE YOU KNOW LOVES CHEESE

Show up with a wheel of cheddar.

CAKE BY THE OCEAN

Pretty baby, if they play that song one…more…time….

*Nod to Jon Hayman

**Young People

***Nod to Adam Gopnik on “The Moth”

Sooper This and That

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soop

I must be the milkman’s daughter (and we did have a milkman) because I’m not cuckoo about football, like my entire family of Giants, Packers, and Patriots fans.

But I do dig everything sooper — including the halftime show and commentary and manful back slapping and those syncopated jigs the naughty players do when they score and, of course, sooper high-quality cakes from the grocery store to commemorate this important day. And I like the office betting pool. And I like to win win win win WIN.

Don’t you?

As Today, So The Year

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mayocornIIIA friend told me years ago to be careful what you do on January 1 because it sets the tone for the whole year. Is this true? Who cares, why take any chances?

That means that no matter how bad you want mayo corn during today’s sporting event or movie, you should probably wait until tomorrow.

Recipe: Buy popcorn. Add mayo from fixin’s bar, or byo mayo packet to venue. Apply mayo to side of bucket for proper management of unruly corns. Use a fork if you can find one (unlikely). Serves two [nutters understood].

The Fairest of the Land

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VT Fairground‘Tis fair season throughout New England, when the bounty of the Land is displayed for quality goodsfun and prizes.

Fairs provide demolition derbies; pig races; games of chance and “skill”; quality goods (studded brassieres, specialty pig racedoormats, Daniel Boone hats, gun-themed accessories); foods that combust internally upon the clicking of the seatbelt on high g-force rides; plus the Germs of Many Counties, steeling you for flu season. Bounty!

special doormatHurry to catch the Vermont State Fair and the Tunbridge World’s Fair. No site has them all but this is okay, as is this; NH fairs are here. Don’t miss the Strolling of the Heifers in 2015.

Just With My Looks, I Could Have Won

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Despite odds and favorites, endorsements and hype, in sporting events ya just never know. In the Olympic opening ceremonies, for example, the U.S. did not medal during the Parade of Nations. Sartorial dark horses Tonga, Kazakhstan, and Andorra (a “landlocked microstate in southwestern Europe”[1]) beat the literal pants off Ireland, Germany, Italy, and the US. That’s with Ralph Lauren et al. hurling unimaginable coin and muscle at it. Better luck next time, soopertailors!

All manner of factors can throw athletes off their game. Weird uniforms, weird weather, weird slogans (Hot. Cool. You.  Huh?), old injuries, new injuries, the incessant clanging of the cowbell slopeside…not to mention Olympic pressure. I for one couldn’t do a giant slalom in front of a single, napping four-year-old. Flop sweat would soak my snowsuit, which would not be a stylin’ hipster snowsuit, but an old beater poofy one (see “weird uniforms” above). Sounds like the making of a terrific nightmare. Don’t worry, the Olympic Committees have enough on their plates with the Junior Olympics, Paralympics, the Senior Games…there will be no Doughy Unfit Sloblympics. Reality TV has that covered, if inadvertently.

The Sochi games were, in a word, fabulous. The opening ceremony was as good as Athens and Vancouver and better than Beijing or London. Kudos, komrades! The $51B price tag, higher than all prior Winter Olympics combined, was naughty but, man, artfully spent. The venues were knockout, the Caucuses backdrop spectacular. If you were lucky enough to see the nighttime bird’s-eye view of the Olympic Village on a high-def TV:  Prekrasno!

Another word: incredible. The skaters’ costumes were better than ever, due in part to advances in adhesives, faceted sparklers, and stretch netting. Velikalepno! The jumps, lifts, and spins (twizzles!): umopotressauschee. The women’s biathlon, wherein women ski uphill with guns, their buff, eurochick bodies rocking gorgeously engineered outdoor wear: totally Bond! The commentators’ near-hysterical coverage during the men’s biathlon: hilariously stirring! The medals? Elegant! Mary Carillo’s cultural vignettes? Captivating! We even dug the ads, from Cadillac’s In America, We Work Hard (“N’est-ce pas?”) to the endlessly repeated Chevy Cruze one (the pained expressions of the car music-haters never grew old) to P&G’s teary series saluting athletes’ mothers. Yo, where’s the fathers’ tribute? Pony up next time, WD-40.

Exciting. Now I hates change (less cowbell? Nyet!), but I suspect that newly added sports grabbed today’s athletes and viewers more than winter’s curling (a popular drinking sport…150 years ago?) or summer’s gymnastics stick-and-ball thing (made sense in… ancient Greece?) New winter additions such as parallel slalom, ski halfpipe, snowboardcross, chick ski jump,and luge team relay engaged the nutters of many nations both on the slopes and off. Zdorovo!

Magical. It seemed nothing could ruin the Olympics for viewers: neither the barrage of pre-game negative press, nor too-warm snow conditions (ruinous to top skiers who didn’t medal), nor worrisome developments in Ukraine, nor an Olympic ring that didn’t open (“Keep going, Vladimir…four—eet’s enough—go!”), nor Johnny Weir’s distracting accoutrements, nor even dumb push notifications and moronic newspeople announcing who’d won before we got to watch it at night. Stoic Putin never devolved into the out-of-control rootin’ tootin’ Pootin I’d hoped for, but he did crack the occasional smile as fellow Russkies went bonkers around him.

Full-on crazy. The Russians did go nuts. So did everyone else. Everyone went wild. People were yelling and texting and jumping up and down around the globe, astonished by the feats of these magnificent young gods and goddesses. Whether it was a nailbiter of a hockey game, a mindbender of a halfpipe trick, a heart attacker of a downhill ski race, an eye-shutter of a skeleton run, or a jawdropper of a figure skating routine by—gasp—a tiny teenager, the fans went wild. What’s more fun than that? All the earthly peoples clapping and crying and grinning and screaming Wow! in 6,000 different languages, including Russian (Ogo! Or if you prefer: Va-ooh!). No really: what’s better than that?

Unforgettable. Who could forget the incredible wins and losses, the moments of jubilance and of crushing defeat after years and years of training? Competitors holding hands, or throwing themselves on the ice, off the podium, into the arms of loved ones…too many to list. I just hope you saw them, along with the breathtaking closing ceremonies. With some systems, you can view the Sochi games over and over. I’ll see you tube-side…knitting and weeping, admiring the determined faces and ripped bodies of the brave, beautiful YPs of all the Lands. Good bawling, and good day.

Quote That Took The Gold

Olympic halfpipe champion Iouri “iPod” Podladtchikov on if he could have beaten Shaun White without YOLO, iPod’s insane signature rotational flip: “Yes. Just with my looks, I could have won.”

If You Can Report Colder Weather Than This

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18 below…I hope you don’t have a dog to walk.

The ReelFeel® here will be 44 below by 4 AM—bad, per AccuWeather®, for kite flying, swimming, and breathing. Not to worry…it will soar to 12 below by 8 AM, when you can resume normal activities. Like hacking away at ice formations on your car, calling in sick, and going back to bed.

Local Treasures

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carpet of leavesOur sunny foliage season was a hit; now for the private after-show for locals. As an artist friend noted with her specialized eyeballs, late foliage affords us remnants of red and gold with the twiggy lines of trees now bald mixed in. As another put it, the leaves on the ground provide a colorfully crunchy carpet before “November’s…dirt.”

Last week’s full moon (the hunter’s moon, traveling moon, or death moon, depending upon your tribe) offered us pagans good lighting for rituals wherein we place into a (lit. or fig.) caldron our wishes for our people and this krazy planet. I put into mine: clarity, love, creativity, strength.  You?

With short days, TV and radio and film become alluring alternatives to outdoor sports. If you podcast, Billy Crystal and Graham Nash crushed on Fresh Air on 10.17, as did the rerun of an April 20th Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me’s “best of” celebrity callers episode (Melinda Gates! Jeff Bridges! A surprisingly hilarious Tony Danza! The Fonz!). Colbert’s on-air wedding for a couple gypped out of their nuptials at a (closed) national monument along with Jon Stewart’s Shutstorm 2013 made the government shut-down almost worthwhile. Randolph’s revamped Playhouse Theater, a local treasure (the oldest cinema in the state), is now rocking Gravity with national treasures Bullock and Clooney.

There’s still time to squeak in a few holes at the Woodstock Inn or Montague Golf Club…fore! While the Bethel Ethels have hung up their rackets for the season, playing tennis on Bethel’s crevice-marred town courts adds an element of chance to a gentlewoman’s game for those with a taste for danger. Terrible players like me can WIN via unforeseen benevolent bounces.

Our weirdly warm foliage aside, two weather phenoms remain certain: (1) it will always be so hot on July 4th that overdressed marching band members faint—or as the boys put it, “pass out”—and (2) it will always be so cold on Halloween you cannot see the kids’ costumes. “Welcome, er, Tundra Fairy! Is that a wing poking out of your…fairy parka?”; “I see you are an Arctic Vampire, young man. Do you take your blood neat, or with iceberg cubes?” I myself hand out Snickers and warm hardboiled eggs, unsure of the effect of chemical handwarmers upon Earth’s mighty landfills.

It’s time to trade in our garden tools for musical instruments and knitting needles. Which for some reason you can take on a plane, but not a nail clipper (pretty sure I could do more damage with a saxophone). Kimball Public Library’s knitting group provides community in Randolph as do the Knitters (Knutters!) of the Round Table at the Whippletree in Woodstock. Get some laffs while banging out colorific holiday gifts.

It’s also time to eat. Which can be counteracted by memberships at VTC, killer MOVE Fitness, or at the Woodstock Inn. For fall dining, personal faves include the Harrington House, Barnard Inn, Big Fatty’s BBQ, Cockadoodle Pizza Café, and Five Olde. My gastronomic goal is both Worthy restaurants some time soon—wanna take me on a date? Ahahaha, that’s so funny. Dating: not a local treasure of the Upper Valley.

For beer I dig Burlington’s unfiltered ale, Switchback; for cocktails a nice Bloody Caesar (Bloody Mary with clam juice) using local Silo Vodka or Vermont Gold, a maple vodka. Crockpotting demands top vegetables from your farmers’ market or the Chef’s Market. And don’t put away the grill—the only time that’s no good is when it’s 20 below. Then the meat freezes on top while the bottom cooks, sort of. Don’t ask me how I know that. For dentistry: wicked old-school kindly Dr. McDonald in Woodstock. For knockout eyeglasses: Eyes on Elm; no competition for 150 miles. Pies? On the Edge Farm on Route 12. Dana wizards the fruits of the Land from apple to sour cherry.

Your monthly Useful Information is this: glucosamine makes you gassy. Your Good News for women is: there is a product for after shaving and waxing called finipil that feels like a York Peppermint Pattie; for men, the beauty industry is catering to aging male boomers with “special formulations” “just for men” (what’s in there?). Next up in the beauty aisle: eyebrow hair relaxant, for old Scottish weird curlicue eyebrow hair growers like me. I hope. Good day.