Youtube Nation: Gymnastics Fanatics

So, the Winter Olympics are just around the corner, which means that approximately nobody gives a damn except for that friend everyone has who still thinks it's 1997 and any respectable people still pretend that "extreme" sports like half-pipe snowboarding are cool. This hasn't stopped the continually flailing folks at NBC from dedicating whole UHF stations to qualifying runs. Skiing, bobsledding and whatever gerund is applied to the luge plays all day, every day as if people enjoy them. Sadly, the Winter Games are never more interesting than the host location, but this year it's in Canada, so that's out as well. No, the only remotely interesting things about the Olympics have to do with the Summer Games, but even then most of us only pretend to be excited for them.

Personally, I find the various ephemera surrounding the Summer Olympics to be sufficiently intriguing but the Games themselves always end up being little more than an infection that afflicts my television once every four years. I do enjoy imagining what absurd things Bob Costas is wearing under that desk of his (prescription therapeutic shoes and schoolboy shorts are my favorite), but the best Olympic content is the training footage.

See, I enjoy Olympic training videos because there's something wrong in my brain that makes me laugh when I watch people putting themselves through pointless agony. I don't care how good of an actor you think you are, you'll never be able to imitate the faces of people trying to dead-lift 450 pounds. I give extra giggle points to the gymnasts because they are not only clearly in an inhuman amount of pain, they also all look like children. I can enjoy this without too much nagging moral discomfort because the majority of Olympic gymnasts are only a few years younger than myself and not, in fact, anorexic five-year-olds.

I call this happy dissonance The Cartoon Animal Effect. Like so many people, I grew up watching a veritable menagerie of cartoon animals being tortured with anvils and dynamite for my amusement. None of this was disturbing because the animals weren't real and they usually survived their trials intact. Had I witnessed, say, a real-life coyote falling off a cliff and crashing into the ground, I'm fairly certain it would have traumatized me for life.

This is why I can't get the same glee out of watching today's video selection, a training montage for Chinese Olympic gymnasts. These aspiring gold medalists look like children because they actually are children. This is a consequence of living in a Communist country. The State can afford to turn individuals into super-specialized functions of the society, training people practically from birth to be really awesome at one thing for a very brief time. I'm not sure what China plans on doing with its current crop of ultra-flexible youngsters once the 2012 Games come and go.

I used to be on the fence about Google playing hard-to-get with China, but now I'm totally on board. Any country that knowingly puts its children through such torture just for its own glory is reprehensible and ought to be...

Oh. Well, this is awkward. Um, Google? I think you should consider boycotting America.