Olympic Blogging

If table tennis, trampoline, badminton, and speedwalking can be Olympic sports, I truly believe that in 2012, blogging should make it's Olympic debut as a sport.

But, in the meantime, I will blog my thoughts on table tennis. Incidentally, I will watch just about anything they call a sport for these Olympics. I'm not ashamed to say I watched trampoline finals tonight.

That's right.

Anyway, I do love what I know as ping-pong. I'm pretty good, if I do say so myself.

However, as an Olympic sport, it seems, well, not of the same level of glory and prestige in winning a gold medal as say . . . any one of Phelps's golds.

For instance,

• There are 7 people in the stands watching the table tennis match that I'm watching right now.
  
• Is it even called a "match?" No one knows.
• The U.S. player is 44 years old. Compare that to the 12-year-old Chinese gymnasts who were probably on the uneven bars before they could walk. Did he have a real job and then one day decide to pursue his life-long dream of being Forrest Gump?
  
• The two guys calling the match keep referring to one of the player's injuries. He has a back injury and a leg injury. Um, how do you get injured in ping-pong? Or was he moving his Lazy Boy recliner at home to make room for his new solid-gold ping-pong table when he threw his back out.
  
• The players spend more time chasing down that tiny ping-pong ball than they do actually playing. Why don't they get ball boys like the tennis players do?
• The U.S. team didn't even bother to send the real coach. They sent some other guy, who just had to help track down the tiny ping-pong ball for the players.
  
• The players just broke the official game ball, which as the commentators just mentioned, is supposed to last the entire match. Do they not understand how many balls I can go through while playing with my friends? Those suckers are hard to find after I smash them on the table with extreme force and awesomeness. Fortunately, the Olympics pre-chooses a back-up ball for the rare cases that the original ball can't make it through a match.
  
• These guys actually go over and towel off between points.
  
• How do you train to become an Olympic Table-Tennis athlete? Is there a special diet? Weight-lifting? Cardio? I kinda feel like I could lay on the couch all day, eat a hunk of cheese and drink a Red Bull, then go down to the Rec Center and beat a few old people and some small children and call that a workout.

Don't get me wrong, those guys play faster than I can keep up with. I admire their skills.

Do I get a medal for staying up late to watch them play? I feel like I should.

C.T.