Olympic Musings

I have not followed or watched a single event at the current Olympic Games in Paris. I will not watch one. I say this not in protest over the fact that a biological man is beating up biological women in the Olympic boxing tournament. For the record, I pity the biological man in this case, because the individual was clearly born with a genetic disorder that must make her life extraordinarily difficult — which is no excuse for allowing a person who has XY chromosomes and has been through male puberty to punch women in the face for sport, but neither is it grounds for humiliating and berating that person in the ugly spotlight of political grandstanding. For what it is worth, however, the International Olympic Committee’s rationalization for their admittance of this boxer, namely that their rules define male and female according to what is on a person’s passport, is surely the worst of all the very bad public statements on this matter, as it is so obviously exploiting the disordered boxer’s ailment as an opportunity to assert a principle that extends far beyond this rare and peculiar case, that principle being that self-identity is reality. Though this particular case is not, as some people carelessly leapt to assume, a transgender controversy, there is no doubt that the IOC and other progressive activist agitators are indeed, with their “what-is-on-the-passport” defense, hoping to use this case as the thin edge of a far more dangerous wedge.

But no, this biological men beating up biological women issue is not the reason I have lost all my old enthusiasm for Olympic sport. In fact, if I wanted to get closer to the heart of my concern and my disinterest, I might observe that this week’s chromosome controversy only exists in the first place because women’s boxing exists, which is an absurdity in itself to me. Women beating each other up in combat sports is inherently somewhat grotesque and biologically anomalous in its own way, and says more about our progressive egalitarian age, the legacy of feminism, and the death of chivalry and female modesty, than does any rare case of a poor soul born with the type of genetic defect which happens to give unfair physical advantages.

Meanwhile, most of the people attacking the IOC for permitting that isolated travesty in the women’s boxing tournament will nevertheless sit enthralled and delighted watching women sprinters (and other power sport athletes) who are obviously so chemically altered that they probably have little more in common with femaleness than that unfortunate Algerian boxer, though without the Algerian’s pitiable excuse. Those women sprinters were not born in masculine bodies, but have had theirs manufactured in laboratories by “sports doctors,” and we are all supposed to be impressed and amazed by their stunning performances, while tiptoeing around their shockingly masculine musculature, their testosterone-suggestive aggression, and (at least in the case of the Americans) their general alpha male vulgarity.

And if I wanted to get even closer to the heart of my disinterest, I might comment on the ever-expanding list of new “sports” being added to the Olympics each time around, almost always in a pathetic attempt to capture the attention of today’s global “youth culture,” i.e., the ugly subculture of perpetual adolescence with its various forms of coolness, mock rebellion, and open hatred for (aka dread of) adult maturity and dignified behavior. Pandering to or palliating “youth,” the weakest link in the progressive zeitgeist, which is to say the crotchety political subversives’ most easily manipulated cannon fodder, is de rigueur in all areas of modern life of course, from education to entertainment to church. But for the Olympic Games to descend, in such a short span of years, from the noble, Greek-inspired tradition of “faster, higher, stronger,” to bikini volleyball, playground skateboarding, and now even breakdancing for God’s sake, in which the “athletes” are called B-boys and B-girls, leads one to wonder what new depths might be on the schedule for the next Olympics? YouTube eating videos? Selfie-posing? Climate protest art defiling? Gender identity transitioning? 

I see that Paris has ramped up the excitement of the triathlon this year by holding the swimming portion of the long-distance race in actual Parisian water, where athletes are competing not only against one another, but against “things that we shouldn’t think about too much,” as one Belgian triathlete politely describes what she saw and felt in the water while competing in the Seine. I imagine we might see some record times in the swimming portion of the event this year, as everyone who wants to go home alive feels the urgency of getting the hell out of the not-so-metaphorical cesspool that grand old Europe has allowed itself to become. I guess it is too much to ask of a country with a thirty-five hour work week, endless strikes (as though a population working part-time jobs for full-time pay and benefits has any right to complain), and the obligation of maintaining its reputation with itself as the nation of lovers and romance, to expect them to find time amid all that loafing and lovemaking to make sure their Olympic guests do not all end up in hospital getting E-coli flushed out of their systems.