London Olympics: unique, exciting, and certainly worth your time

The 2012 London Olympics are breaking viewership records, and for good reason.  Let's get real - after a long day at work, what else are we going to watch when we get home at night and sit on our couch?  Baseball is on all the time - literally, every single night throughout the summer - so some gymnastics or water polo is a refreshing change of pace from the norm. NHL? Exciting, but done. NBA? Exciting, but done. NFL? Almost...in fact, so close that about 1/2 of every SportsCenter is focused on training camp. They've even got a special crew camped out at the Jets' camp for crying out loud.

Yet, this August is not all about football. Yes, we're waiting.  But in the meantime, a baseball/Olympic tag-team is really not that bad of a deal. With the Nationals in the playoff hunt and playing consistently well for the first time in years, I'm actually starting to pay attention to the sport. Heck, a few nights ago I even watched the majority of a game on TV!  For a baseball-critic like me, that's impressive.  Then again, maybe I'm just getting desperate. 

As good as the Nats have been, the main event this summer is in London.  If baseball is John Cena in our tag-team analogy, the Olympics are Hulk Hogan.  We are channel surfing late one night and happen to stop on the WWE channel 23932-something, and for a while it's pretty entertaining.  They're both good when football isn't on.  But Hulk just has the look that puts him over the competition.  That mustache is just insane. It's bright, it's different, it stands out.  That's the amazing thing about weightlifting and badminton and gymnastics.  You just don't see things like this everyday.  In all seriousness, I was going crazy after watching McKayla Maroney's perfect vault.  I'm a 20-year old college guy who loves all things manly (such as hard-hitting football), and yet I was going nuts after watching a 16 year-old girl (who probably loves Justin Bieber and likes glitter and sparkly pens) do a crazy routine that I would easily break my bones trying to copy.  

The novelty and uniqueness of Olympic sports is why we tune in every four years - it's something we can marvel at and appreciate simply because we don't see it too often.  When we do see it, it comes at the perfect time - that transition period in the middle of the summer between basketball and football, when it's so hot out that we sit inside with the TV on and the a/c cranked up, when baseball seems likes it's been on forever and there are no real controversies brewing (excluding those invented by the media).  

Combine that with the national pride.  Yes, it's cliche.  But just because we've heard it before doesn't mean it isn't real.  I feel it.  It's in the China-US medal count battle (politics and sports have a lot in common).  It's in the Russian gymnast crying as she watches the glorious U.S. capture gold (Soviets lose again!).  There's pride in seeing our boys win the swimming relays, or watching our NBA supers'tars drop 156 on Nigeria.  It's a more polite way of saying "yea, we're better than you."  Go USA.

Just one more thing: for all this outrage about NBC's decision not to broadcast many events live, I think they're doing a pretty good job.  Ratings are better than ever.  For those of us at work, we don't have access to a TV during the day anyway.  And does it really even matter?  There's something beautiful about sports that doesn't involve seeing it "live."  The grace, the agility, the athleticism - even though we already know the result of Phelps' final race or Gabby's championship routine, we watch it anyway because we want to see how it happened. It's like your favorite movie - say, The Dark Knight.  You know how it ends, but you watch it for the excitement, for the acting, for watching Heath Ledger's masterful performance.

It's certainly worth watching.  And it makes for some pretty good summer-time TV.