The IOC recently announced some new winter events, including “team figure skating” but they have yet to make a decision on whether to include the snowboard or ski slopestyle events.
Now, I’m on record as thinking that the Olympic snowboarding events are a joke and more to the point, it is nothing more than a thinly veiled, hyper-nationalistic, faux patriotism-inspiring charade designed to siphon maximum dollars out of your wallet and in to the hands of large corporations. The Olympics dumb everything down, packaging them up in easily consumable soundbites and highlight reels on tape delay to fit in to pre-packaged prime time TV segments, in order to market you more shit that you don’t need to buy.
Shaun White wins halfpipe gold at Vancouver 2010 Olympics
Once you open the doors to teams of ice ballerinas engaged in a “sport” which literally nobody in the world actually participates in, you ought to just open up the doors to anybody with any pretend sport that they invented yesterday lke maybe you could go on really big skis and down a super big slide and see how far you can “jump”. That sounds like it would fit right in!
Snowboarding is not about multi-million dollar commercial endorsements or building disposable billion-dollar stadiums in third world countries to push some capitalist agenda. Snowboarding is not about “America, Fuck Yeah!” or whatever jingoistic slogan the mouth-breathers in your home country adhere to.
I’d be perfectly content and not the least bit jealous if snowboarding wasn’t in the Olympics at all, because snowboarding is — or should be — about going out and having fun. And nothing else.
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