Shameful Olympics Coverage to Start

The media horse-race coverage of Olympics 2020, like politics, does nobody any favors -- neither the players competing nor the society that feeds off of their uplifting performances

Simone Biles starts Olympics with floor exercise that isn’t up to her usual standards.

In her third tumbling pass, her momentum caused her to fly out of bounds and off the competition floor. It was one of her worst floor performances of the year.

Stop calling this young lady a GOAT. That's not mentally fair to her as a young female black athlete to carry the weight of history on her shoulders because of her external characteristics. She's an athlete, no more, no less.

Stop making athletes out to be society's saviors. They're not. They can just twist, and run and swim and leap, faster further and stronger than the rest of us. On their best days, there is glory, more amazing becasue it is so fleeting... The bodies age. The muscles become fat. The times increase and the heights drop. 

They are but humans for one moment showing us what we can do physically as a human race. Celebrate that, when it happens... 

Never expect glory. Never demand nor expect they owe us more than their physical best, that day.  That's the beauty part -- the humanity, the humanness in knowing physically what these men and women are accomplishing and overcoming in putting those thrilling physical performances out there for us to see and share...

It's a joy to watch them compete, it's just fun to watch them run (and swim, and toss, and leap, and ... aspire, all in the physical human bodies they own and control, even in our professional sports management days).

You're not really fully human yet if you don't understand that and can't share in the simple joy of performance today. Never expect glory, but be good to her if she shows. It's short-lived, but it's enough.*

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*Go Team USA. Give us your best, that's all we can ask. For those about to rock, we salute you!

** Coraje, aging comrades who remember the home-grown glories of '84: Carl Lewis, Mary Lou Retton, and who can forget old Joan Benoit bursting through the tunnel of the Coliseum in the inaugural Olympics marathon for women?  Free tv, prime-time, in our own backyard in LA....  

Glory Days of our own to celebrate and recall...

***I think I've almost successfully managed to banish the image of Richard Slaney picking poor Mary Decker up from the track after my then-favorite tripped over the heels of barefoot runner Zola Budd.  I lost respect for a hero in that moment -- it happens -- whom I hoped would earn gold as a distance runner in my sport then.  

That's the Olympics too -- learning. losing, and how you react.  To this day, I wish Mary Decker would have gotten back up on her own two feet and finished her race.  Having her future husband Richard Slaney lift her, crying -- from the track -- broke my 15-year-old heart.  She didn't even finish the race, glory or not.  But see again, that's the flip side of the beauty part, in all it's humanity too...