Funny but I haven’t heard word one said in Buzzy’s Country Store about any of the ongoing Winter Olympic games currently being played in China. However, my FB friend Jon Sevel summed it up pretty well when he noted the following:
Does anyone else think the Winter Olympics is a compilation of really stupid events…. I just can’t get into it. It’s like a bunch of baggy pants stoners saying, “hey watch this!”
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Buzzy and I were in China in 2002 and even then, 6 years out, the Chinese were preparing to host the 2008 Olympics (click here.) There was so much building going on in Beijing that our tour guide joked that their national bird was a crane as in a building crane.
The other thing I recall our tour guide telling us is that Beijing was noted for its flyovers because they did not like intersections, traffic lights nor traffic circles. Our guide pointed out that whenever they had a traffic problem at an intersection, they simply built some flyovers as shown here:
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| I Always Think of This When Sitting Stuck in Traffic at the Rt 4/235 Intersection Light |
So, China hosted the Olympics in 2008 and here they are 14 years later hosting again. Kinda makes you wonder if those allegations aren’t true about the International Olympic Committee (IOC) folks being a little slippery when it comes to selecting which cities get to host their events. (For a good article and a behind the scenes look at the IOC selection process read this article (click here) on why Chicago did not get the 2016 Olympics. Usually, these decisions always come down to money; but in the Chicago case there were even more factors impacting IOC’s decision to hold those Olympics in Rio, Brazil. Note too that Bryant Gumble on HBO’s Real Sports has also done several good investigations into IOC’s dealings (click here.) His most recent story ran a just a few weeks ago (click here.)
Obviously, you can tell I am not into the Olympics. However, if you were to put a gun to my head and told me that I absolutely had to watch one Winter Olympics event, I guess that the dirty old man in me would opt for the women’s ice-skating competition. Probably because I like some of the music they skate to, right?