It was one of Edward Gibbon’s five attributes that marked the fall of the Roman Empire: freakishness in the arts.
The others, increased desire to live off the state, enthusiasm pretending to be creativity, a mounting love of show and luxury, an obsession with sex and especially homosexuality also apply to the Paris Olympics of 2024, but “freakishness in the arts” kicked off the spectacle, and we just saw it displayed in vivid detail. This isn’t surprising since the last Olympics was a diabolical woke-fest, or given how freakish pride has raged unchecked across much of the globe for several years. But I must admit, I’d retained a faint hope (perhaps a desperate plea) that this year might be different. Silly me.
The Olympics used to be a big thing in our house.
Aside from a dozen or so annual Kansas City Chiefs games (depending on the playoffs), we don’t watch sports. Every four years was the exception. Shannon and I used to roll out the TV and the giant world map, and let the kids watch the Olympics for two weeks straight. I’d even meld geography and history lessons into the experience, but mostly it was just a fun Guerra thing for a family that homeschools year round.
One year I had the kids all pick a country to root for (unless the U.S. was competitive in that event, like soccer). They drew flags and had a good time with it. I think one of my kids was bummed when Michael Phelps crushed his Greek swimmer, but I might be misremembering that.
We’d enjoy all of it, even the lesser-covered events that most people never bother with, like rhythmic gymnastics and curling. From BMX aerials and diving in the summer to snowboarding and ice hockey in the winter, we watched it all.
I jumped for joy in 2016 when our girls beat Canada for the ice hockey gold medal. I even wrote an article about it somewhere on the internet. We’d let the kids stay up late to watch speed skating, or whatever we could find on the tube. In frustration, I sought out ways to view teams other than USA in the hockey tournament. Around this time I discovered that by using a VPN with a Canadian server we could watch every single event live-streamed or recorded on Canadian’s Olympic website, instead of the abbreviated junk NBC would filter for you. You probably still can.
But the Olympics just don’t appeal anymore. Wokeness and freakish displays of debauchery have soured that once-unifying biannual event. The NFL had the same woke problem for a season or two, but now at least its sins are limited to the Super Bowl Halftime show, which I haven’t watched since 2001 anyway. Yet judging from the opening ceremonies of the Paris Olympics, they’ve decided to put mental illness and blasphemy front and center.
When the IOC denied swimmer Dylan Thomas’ plea to once again sexually traumatize women in locker rooms and compete against them in the pool, I held out hope. Perhaps the waves of evil masquerading as progress had finally ebbed in their erosion of our cultural coastline. I’d hoped the world finally agreed that enough was enough. This far and no further.
That remains to be seen, and perhaps the Satanic opening ceremonies will break a few camels’ backs. If not, then I suppose it spells the end of an era.
It All Started With Raw Cookie Dough
In the summer of 1996, Shannon and I had been together for three months. We had fallen hard in love and were spending as much time together as my traveling work schedule would allow. For a couple weeks we found ourselves watching the Atlanta Olympics into the wee hours of the night, often sharing a Pillsbury tube of raw cookie dough as we watched Michael Johnson, Andre Agassi, Shannon Miller, and Kerri Strug do their things. We were doing that when the bomb went off. There was no internet in those days to get updates from my dad, who was in attendance.
Something about that two-week-long experience transformed the Olympics into one of “our things,” a tradition we carried on through twenty-some years and seven kids. One year I was late for work because I just had to see the overtime finish of a hockey game. In 2012, we cheered for Team USA from a restaurant in Bulgaria, astounding both our American and Bulgarian friends with memories of every Olympics up to that point, scrawling the venues down on a pizza box to keep them in order.
But normally, the Olympics weren’t on par with a KC Super Bowl. Rarely did we jump up and down or find ourselves on the edge of our seats. They were more like a vacation; a couple of weeks where the reclusive TV emerged from the closet, and stayed plugged in for a change. The Olympics meant easy dinners, a chance to cheer a random guy from Zimbabwe and learn a little about his home, or watch a young Croatian snowboarder simply shred it with ease. It was a rare opportunity to see grown men tear up after achieving their lifelong goal. The standard instrumental version of the National Anthem was never cringe, and you never tired of hearing it.
The Olympics used to make the world a little smaller, used to make the world’s problems less important. They paused the divisions that cultural animosity wedged between every other week of the year.
Since 2020, however, and especially this year, the modern variation of the Games appears to have unleashed a truckload of rattlesnakes within the big tent: a spectacle so outlandish it threatens to magnify everything vile about the world that the Olympic Games used to transcend. Where physical achievements were once honored, they’ve chosen to lay a sacrifice on the altar of freakishness instead.
I still hold out hope that the Olympics will one day become what they once were, what they managed to be for so long, even if I have to wait a few years to see this modern iteration fizzle itself out. There is still one Guerraling who’s never seen an Olympic event, never enjoyed the memories his brothers and sisters still cherish. I pray he will soon enjoy a world restored, a world where human achievement is honored more than attention-seeking blasphemy.
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