Enemies on the Ground, Lovers on the Court

You'd think that beyond the showiness of it all, the Olympics would at least be a place for countries to fight out their age-old grudges. You'd think that, for example, when Georgia's beach volleyball team took on Russia's yesterday there would've been some seriously angry and vengeful spiking, which would have made it interesting to watch. You'd think so, but you'd be wrong. Georgia's team wasn't even from Georgia. They were from freaking Brazil. This prompted one of the players from the Russian team to tell the New York Times, "If they were Georgian it certainly would be interesting... But they are not. They don't know who is the president of Georgia, I am sure." Uh, exactly. Isn't the whole point of the Olympics for nations to compete against one another -- with members of their own country?

Imagine climbing up the stairs to your partially bombed-out apartment from some basement in Gori and turning on your television. Here are the self-ceremoniously named Brazilians, Saka and Rtvelo (put them together and what does that spell--"Georgia" in Georgian!) And what are these two world representatives of Georgia doing? They are--what's this--hugging their Russian opponents. What? The elderly in Tbilisi must've been adjusting their TVs and telling their next of kin to bring their other glasses to them. The horror!

Too bad the world can't wage wars in this way. The US could outsource our military from, say, Sweden. We could send a bunch of Swedish soldiers to our place of contention and they could kind of look around and say to each other, "Yeah, you know, I never really had a problem with [name of country]." "Hmm, me neither. Do we still bomb them then? Wanna build some houses instead since we're here?"

Comments

[ham12ham]

Hi Jess-

Love the posts! This is Mike from Saturday, just saying hi. If you wanna say hi back, drop me a line at mhamersky AT gmail dot com. Hope to hear from you soon...

-Mike

[Monstertruck]

This also leaves the question..­.Could the world successfully battle over religion, land and other paternal nonsense via a series of barani's? Or perhaps, if an average Russian can beat an average Georgian in the most perfect back salto dismount, then Russia could take over? Or maybe this would just lead into the next set of challenges. Which seven year old girl can lift the most? Which elderly couple can beat another in a 100 meter relay. That way, the entire country would be involved and be able to say, "No, that's stupid, I'm not doing the breaststroke for that place."