Olympic (and artistic) geeks

The geeks of Beijing:
Let us now praise the obscure sports

TOM PURDOM

The first event of every Olympics is the women’s ten-meter air rifle. I acquired this bit of Olympic trivia because the winner in 2000 happened to be an American, and a headline announcing her victory appeared on my computer screen when I checked the morning news. If she’d been Chinese, like the medalist in 2004, or Czech, like this year’s winner, I wouldn’t have known that the Olympics included another group of contestants I could relate to.

I’ll never be a football player or a weight lifter and never hoped to be. But air rifle? There’s something I actually did when I was young. I was pretty good at it, too.

The air rifles used in the Olympics are a bit more powerful than my Daisy Red Ryder carbine. They have a muzzle velocity of 500 feet per second— about twice the muzzle velocity of my boyhood treasure. The targets are a trifle smaller than tin cans. The bull’s eye— the ten ring— is a dot the size of a standard period. The nine ring is about an inch wide. In the first part of the finals, the women fire 40 shots in 70 minutes. A perfect score is 400— 40 hits on that dot. The eight women who compete in the second round of the finals all shoot scores in the 390s. Optical sights are not permitted.

The men’s ten-meter air rifle contest follows the women’s. The men’s gold this year went to Abhinav Bindra of India. In the entire history of the Olympics, India had won only eight gold medals, all collected by its hockey team. Mr. Bindra is therefore the first Indian to win a gold medal in an individual event.

The stuff NBC prefers

So far this month I have watched synchronized diving, rowing, saber fencing, bicycling, weight lifting, table tennis, badminton, archery, equestrian dressage, beach volley ball, and team volley ball, in addition to the more standard stuff NBC assumes everyone will follow. Most of the events on that list couldn’t command two minutes on daytime TV if they weren’t part of the Olympics. They get their moment in the spotlight because every athlete in the Olympic village belongs to a national team and every medal is considered an achievement for the athlete’s nation. Once every four years, table tennis sharks and air rifle sharpshooters emerge from obscurity to become the standard bearers of mighty nations.

NBC may think the hero of this Olympiad is the American swimmer Michael Phelps. Most of the people I know feel the real stars are Misty May and Kerri Walsh. Their quest for their second gold medal in beach volleyball supports the great truth that Billy Jean King proclaimed more than four decades ago. Billy Jean didn’t claim that women tennis pros could outplay the best men. She campaigned for equal purses on the grounds that the women’s contests were “equally entertaining for their audiences.”

You can make that same claim for the sport pursued by May and Walsh. I didn’t even know beach volleyball existed until I accidentally watched a men’s game four years ago. Personally, I think it’s much more fun to watch than most so-called major sports. The movements can be spectacular, the long volleys are dramatic and suspenseful, and the scoring system is so straightforward it can even be grasped by the liberal arts graduates of Southern California universities.

The case for sack racing

There is no rational reason why some sports should be minor and others major. Badminton and indoor volleyball are just as interesting as tennis and basketball. The most popular sport in the world, soccer, has been a minor sport in the U.S. for most of its history. The Olympics, by introducing the forces of tribalism, upend the attitudes created by historical accidents.

If sack racing became an Olympic event, we would all madly cheer our national champion if he or she made it to the finals. And somewhere in the world, the citizens of some ultra-conservative country with a population smaller than West Philadelphia’s would pin their hopes for happiness on the fact that their nation had produced the best female sack racer on the globe.

All these minor sports have their own subcultures, with tournaments, international governing bodies, and their own world championships. The Olympic air gunners post those phenomenal scores because they stand at the top of a pyramid. All over the world, thousands of people devote large segments of their lives to the art of hitting a dot at 32 feet. Thousands of other people are mastering the intricacies of fencing, rowing, field hockey, gymnastics, and every other activity that has forced its way into the fifty-ring Olympic circus.

How athletes resemble artists

This spectacle should look familiar to any moderately successful writer or artist. I’ve spent much of my life in a subculture in which sociable, likable people isolate themselves in little rooms so they can pound words into championship science fiction stories. And that subculture is part of a larger milieu populated by would-be writers who inundate publishers and agents with thousands of manuscripts each month.

This literary culture is, in its turn, one subsection of a global arena in which young violinists, pianists and dancers climb a competitive pyramid that’s just as grueling as the ordeal endured by young gymnasts. The true spirit of the Olympics is the force that has shaped much of the modern world: the relentless drive of the obsessive-compulsive personality reinforced by the chimera of gold and glory. The Olympics merely represent one of the more visual branches of geekdom.

Ever since I started reading science fiction, I’ve heard people wonder what we’ll do when robots handle all the work and medical progress endows us with centuries of life. The Olympics are inspiring evidence that we enjoy an infinite capacity to become fascinated by activities that lack any practical value.`



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