Vaulting Terror

The first couple of years I attended CSH, three days of the week we had normal PE class (complete with dodgeball) and two days of the week we had gymnastics. Yes, gymnastics, with tumbling mats, a balance beam, uneven parallel bars, and a vaulting horse (which has since been replaced by a thing that looks like a big tongue).


I wonder if they can still afford the liability insurance for that equipment.


Watching the gymnastics meets at the Olympics, I was suddenly reminded of the terror the vaulting horse held for me in middle school. I'm not sure why this year I was reminded of it; certainly I've never forgotten that we had gymnastics class as I still know how to do a cartwheel, and I've seen pieces of gymnastics meets many times since 1980. One moment I was watching the event and the next I was remembering one of the girls in my class calling out "Go!" and each girl's name as they started running toward the horse. She was ahead of me in line so I didn't have to worry about whether she was going to call out my name or not (I didn't think she would have if my turn had been ahead of hers).


I was one of the least athletic girls in the class and I would always, always, have preferred to be reading a book. I disliked gymnastics less than I disliked PE, mostly because in gymnastics I wasn't picked second-to-last for a team that I would then let down during the game. Even so, I sucked at almost everything but stretching, and had to face mocking about how I couldn't even do this or that in gymnastics.


The thing I sucked at the most, however, was the vaulting horse. An excellent student would run down the path, hit the springboard, and jump over the horse with just her palms touching it, and land on the mats behind, hands in the air a' la Nadia Comaneci. The other successful students would run down the path, hit the springboard, and jump onto the horse in a crouch, then jump down onto the mat and "Y" their arms.


I would run down the path, hit the springboard, and just bounce enough to get my hands flat on the horse. I was never convinced that I was running fast enough to jump high enough to not crash directly into the horse. I never got high enough to raise my knees to even get on the horse. The teacher would give me several attempts, and I would fail at them all, out of fear.


Eventually the 1980's and aerobics came along. I think younger kids continued to take gymnastics, but in 7th and 8th grades we alternated aerobics with PE.

Los Juegos Olimpicos Parte Dos

It's been great to be seeing so many athletes and sports. Telemundo is following the Spanish-speaking countries and Brazil very closely (of course), rather than focusing on the Americans and their rivals in each given sport (the Chinese in gymnastics, the Jamaicans in track, etc.). Michael Phelps didn't swim the 50-meter free, so I wonder if it was even televised on NBC. The Frenchmen placed second and third, and the Brazilian who won the gold must not have been the favorite, because Cielo Filho sobbed through the second half of the Hino Nacional Brasileiro, winning my heart over the Americans, who stood on the podium not crying, not laughing, and not singing, but chatting during "The Star Spangled Banner."


Michael Phelps must know the words by now.


It became apparent to me during the gymnastics meet that the Russians were Brazil's rivals for these Games, while the new Cold War was playing out between the Chinese and the US (remember when all the American fingers would get pointed at the East Germans and the Soviets?). I watched that meet on NBC before I watched it on Telemundo and NBC showed just the two teams while Telemundo showed gymnasts from Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Russia, Germany, Australia, and Poland.


I've also watched lots of volleyball, and seen chunks of judo, tae kwon do, rowing, futbol, diving (synchro and solo), and handball. I'm a few days behind everyone else but I don't care about spoilers. I watch no sports in the rest of my life, and in fact haven't even watched this much of the Summer Games in years, so I have no real loyalties to individual countries' teams. And again, since the commentary is in Spanish, I don't watch anything with preconceived notions about who's going to do what except for those (Bolt, Gay, Liukin, Phelps, Torres) I've heard about in the American press.


I root for everyone who's striving in these Games, because everyone is doing the best he or she can, and because I don't really care who wins. "It's not winning or losing, it's how you play the game." I know that philosophy would not have brought these athletes this far, but I'm just watching.

Los Juegos Olimpicos

I'm watching the Olympics on Telemundo via DVR. This is so that recording the Olympics doesn't interfere with recording anything on the SciFi channel, but it's also provided the unintentional benefit of improving my Spanish ear. While I can't understand a single thing said on La Raza's radio station, Telemundo's announcers speak so clearly and slowly that I can follow a lot of what's being said, if I want to. I never want to listen to the comments about athletes' performances, and this way I don't have to. I just turn off my Spanish ear.


I chuckle when the text on the screen says "baloncesto" or "balonmano" and in a blur of words from Jessi Losada I hear "basketball" or "handball." The same is true of the athlete's names, which make me wonder if the announcers just really practice the sounds. The interview with the proprietress of a roast duck restaurant was conducted in English and Spanish, with English being the common language between Leti Coo and the Chinese. I watched NBC prerecorded interviews with Michael Phelps and with Dara Torres in which their words were muffled, but not totally blocked out, by the Spanish translation. This made it easier for me to understand the Spanish. The interviews with the Spanish-speaking athletes I mostly can't understand as the athletes speak "regular" Spanish.


I also got a kick out of the Canadian synchro diving team member hwo counted off, "Une, deaux, trois, GO!"


On Telemundo, they're pronouncing "Beijing" properly, with a hard "J" as in "juice" and not the "zh" as in "leisure" that's being said on NBC.


Finally, I've had two dreams in Spanish. In the dreams my Spanish is perfect.

I don't care, and yet...

I'm a little sad about the Rockies losing the World Series in four games. I'm surprised I have any feelings about it at all. I care even less about baseball than I do about football. I only care about football to the extent that vaguely following the 49ers has made it a little easier to live with my mother and my brother, big football fans that they are.


However, I do love Colorado and the Rockies (the mountains, not the baseball team), and the Rockies' Triple A team used to play in Portland when I lived there. I can't remember what they were called, but they had beautiful patches on their hats: A rose in front of Mount Hood.


"There's always next year!"

Don't It Always Seem To Go...

When I was in middle school, two of the girls in the carpool were taking figure skating lessons. My neighbor DeeKay was one, and the girl who'd been our hook-up for the carpool in the first place was the other. Skating lessons were on Wednesdays, and I think DeeKay's mom may have been the Wednesday driver. We all went to what we called "Skates" on 48th Avenue.


DeeKay and the other girl owned their own ice skates, shiny white and with blade protectors. The rest of us rented ours, brown with the shoe size printed on the back of the heel. The ice rink smelled like the inside of a freezer, and the oval-shaped rink had a mural of people skating on a frozen pond with snow on the evergreens around it. There was a wooden fence along the high side to keep people from falling onto the rink when they walked into the building, and along the right side was the enclosed snack bar, which smelled like what a freezer would smell like if you'd left a few cups of hot chocolate in there. We bought Nestle Crunch candy bars and played Space Invaders there.


DeeKay's lesson was in the middle of the rink and I watched her skate backwards and try an axel or a camel spin. All I knew how to do was skate forward, and I did that, as fast as I could. As I sped, crouched, along the outside of the rink I imagined myself to be Eric Heiden, who won five gold medals and set Olympic and world records in all of the speed-skating events.


We didn't just go after school for DeeKay's lessons. I remember going there with the kids from the neighborhood (as opposed to the carpool kids), and DeeKay had one if not two birthday parties there. When he was eight or nine, No broke his thumb there when a man skating backwards crashed into him. After Ryebread moved to Washington State and then moved back, sometime during my senior year of high school, a group of us wound up ice skating. I remember feeling really happy because it was so simple and didn't involve trying to drink beer.


They tore down the ice rink while I was in the Northwest and built townhouses or condos on the property. I'm still sad that the old rink, which was admittedly small and in an old rickety building, is gone. I have spent much more time on dance floors than on ice, but I would love to smell that ice-and-chocolate smell and wear those heavy boots again, and take another Eric Heiden spin around the rink.

Some Things I Don't Understand

* Why does the US do business with China but not with Cuba?

* Why are US politicians and media talking about a "dignified death" for people who have been hanged by the government of their country? What is dignified about hanging in the first place?

* Why is it important that a politician has drug use in his or her past?

* Why is alcohol accepted and marijuana isn't?

* Why can countries with nuclear weapons (the US, the UK, France, Russia, and China) insist that other countries (such as Korea, Iran, India, and Pakistan) cannot have nuclear weapons?

* Why does it matter if an athlete is or was using steroids?

* How do those colleges that earn a lot from football and basketball games justify using students to bring in revenue without compensating those athletes (note that most big-game athletes do not get "free rides")?

* How do people square wanting a small government (social services programs, privatization of Social Security and Medicare) with wanting the same government to regulate social issues (marriage, abortion)?

* Why do people complain about attack ads but - apparently - respond to them, hence encouraging their continued use?

I don't know enough about these issues to understand them. If someone understands the foreign policy issues, the domestic issues, and/or the athletic issues enough to explain what's going on here, I would sure like to listen.