Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Runner's Heights: Olympic musings...

Cumulative Mileage: 180 miles

Irony of ironies...I ran the least during the last two weeks of the world's greatest sporting event -- the Olympics. Anyway, watching Usain Bolt was a revelation, his legs reminding me of the giant pounding machines of the Terminator. And, in my opinion, the team sport that captured the imagination of this Olympics was volleyball. I predict that, one day, NCAA Volleyball will be as big and as exciting as the NCAA basketball or football and I hope the NCAA Women's volleyball gets a word in, edgewise, to popularize this amazing, minimal-contact sport among the citizens of the world. American football is barely a world sport, as evidenced by the very few nations that engage in it, and that is just as well, because it is more about brute force than pure atheleticism. Now, that's going to rile a lot of fans of this so-called sport but just look at how scant the popularity of this game is around the world. The rest of the world is crazy about basketball, baseball, and volleyball but American football...umm, sorry, no takers. And what's with the name anyway...why is it called football when most the time, the players are grappling with the ball with their hands?

The Democratic convention is on and Obama hagiography is in full swing this week. Hillary Clinton gave the best speech so far and it makes you wonder why, with 18 million votes to her credit, she was passed over for the veep position. Strange are the mores of politics.


"That's it, Joe...Let's join our corporations with your jumbo stapler!"