Orange(man) Alert

I needed to post something to push that (SU alum) Costas picture further down. My, but does he do smug well!

It's a shame, too, because he was once good. He has become taken with his own self-importance, a trait that seems to have overtaken many of the NBC on-air "personalities". Can you think of Katie Couric without thinking of her as the doyenne of a certain class of female overachievers who exude a certain arrogance that prevents me, at least, from experiencing their on-air act without, at a conscious level, realizing that I don't really like this person.

When I think of Jim McKay (St. Joe's guy!), I think of a guy who was the polar opposite: he himself wasn't the event, the Olympics were the event, and he was there to coordinate coverage of the various competitions. He was the emcee who didn't need to hog the spotlight. A far cry from the self-consciously self-important talking heads of today.

I have always liked the winter Olympics, exactly for the reasons that the racist Bryant Gumbel decried them: I like seeing luge, bobsled, ski jumping, and the like every four years. So what if there isn't an equivalent of the NFL for these sports, or that the color of the skin of those who excel at them is paler than that of those who excel in track & field and basketball?

Still, this was an Olympics that was hard to embrace, from the phony pretension of NBC demanding that Turin be called "Torino" to the haughtiness of Costas, Couric, and the rest, to the antics of bozos such as Bode Miller. I could also do with a lighter percentage of ice skating/dancing, but that's a losing cause. Still, I was able to enjoy them for what they were.

Yet I remain wary about the long-term health of the Olympic games. Changes in the political landscape, the doping scandals, etc. make competition of this type almost a caricature of what they were supposed to be: an amateur sports festival that brings countries together. Not that they ever really were pristine, but they were better in the past, and the slide into oblivion may be inevitable.