Random Olympic Thoughts
Aug. 23rd, 2008 06:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienReal shot-putters are built like tanks; it's hardly surprising I was useless at it as a slight preteen and teenager. (I don't think anybody at our school could heave the thing more than a body-length or two; I was lucky to manage more than three feet.)
Rhythmic gymnastics -- lots of graceful movements and twirling of ribbons, hoops or clubs, in pretty costumes -- seems to be a former-Soviet-Union thing, or maybe central Asia.
Talking of gymnastics, the only thing I recognized from my school days was the occasional forward roll in the floor exercise. I do seem to remember lining up to try to vault over something that looked rather like a pommel horse, but I'm fairly sure I never actually made it off the ground. Half the time I refused like a balky horse at the high jump, too; the noise and shin-bruising sharpness of the bar were more unpleasant than ridicule.
Apparently passing the baton in relay races is really hard. The batons are more colorful than the wooden sticks we used to use, but it still brings back memories of Athletics lessons at the sports field on Manchester Road. (We did [field] hockey in the autumn and spring terms, athletics [track and field to Americans] in summer: running and hurdles, javelin, discus and shot, and long jump into a sandpit. I was fairly useless at all of it, of course, but at least there was some variety to it, and the weather was usually more clement than it was for hockey.
Synchronized swimming looks more skilled and athletic than I'd imagined, but still fairly bizarre.
Does anyone else remember the days when Olympians were supposed to be strictly amateur? That changed long enough ago that no-one mentions it much any more, but I remember one of my junior-school reading books had a story about a guy who was stripped of his medals for accepting a small amount of money to play soccer or something. (I also don't know how massive state sponsorship, as practiced by China and the Soviet bloc, played into that in the old days.)
They keep saying the Mao portrait on the Gate of Heavenly Peace is changed every year, but it looks just like my photograph from 2006, as far as I can tell.
Rhythmic gymnastics -- lots of graceful movements and twirling of ribbons, hoops or clubs, in pretty costumes -- seems to be a former-Soviet-Union thing, or maybe central Asia.
Talking of gymnastics, the only thing I recognized from my school days was the occasional forward roll in the floor exercise. I do seem to remember lining up to try to vault over something that looked rather like a pommel horse, but I'm fairly sure I never actually made it off the ground. Half the time I refused like a balky horse at the high jump, too; the noise and shin-bruising sharpness of the bar were more unpleasant than ridicule.
Apparently passing the baton in relay races is really hard. The batons are more colorful than the wooden sticks we used to use, but it still brings back memories of Athletics lessons at the sports field on Manchester Road. (We did [field] hockey in the autumn and spring terms, athletics [track and field to Americans] in summer: running and hurdles, javelin, discus and shot, and long jump into a sandpit. I was fairly useless at all of it, of course, but at least there was some variety to it, and the weather was usually more clement than it was for hockey.
Synchronized swimming looks more skilled and athletic than I'd imagined, but still fairly bizarre.
Does anyone else remember the days when Olympians were supposed to be strictly amateur? That changed long enough ago that no-one mentions it much any more, but I remember one of my junior-school reading books had a story about a guy who was stripped of his medals for accepting a small amount of money to play soccer or something. (I also don't know how massive state sponsorship, as practiced by China and the Soviet bloc, played into that in the old days.)
They keep saying the Mao portrait on the Gate of Heavenly Peace is changed every year, but it looks just like my photograph from 2006, as far as I can tell.