We’re trained monkeys, we Americans.  Every four years, we plop down to watch teenage girls flipping over and over and over again.  They pound into the floor in ways that would rip every tendon and break every bone in my ankles (I sit here at two in the morning nursing my second strained calf after an afternoon of soccer coaching followed by two sets of tennis).

The daughter of this guy just took the All Around Gold Medal in Artistic Gymnastics (which used to be called Gymnastics).

We’re all experts in the bizarre scoring, with no clue how the parameters of the scoring are either established or ultimately determined.  Much like the ridiculousness that is figure skating, we somehow have to wade into all of this each Olympiad and hope we’ve learned enough to hold a conversation with our neighbor or wife (or our neighbor’s wife).

We weathered the outrageous controversy that the Chinese might actually be too young, giving them the incredible advantage of being too stupid to understand that they should feel terrified that they may lose out on a Wheaties box deal if they fall on their little butts.  I do know that if I need bypass surgery, I’m heading to some Middle School in Shanghai and letting one of those little pre-teens take a crack at it.

And now the lanky SMU student from Plano (where a childhood friend played in a 30,000 seat football stadium in high school in the mid-’80s before heading to A&M) has beaten the next Mary Lou Retton.  Of course, I stayed up to watch all this mess with an icepack on my calf, then cried as Nastia Liukin fought to hold back the tears on the medals stand as her father received hugs from overweight Pageant Moms in the background.

I love America.

Tags: gymnastics, Nastia Liukin, Shawn Johnson, Wheaties

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 11:09 pm and is filed under Sporting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.