Frisbay!
So if you haven’t seen this already then you need to now.
http://vimeo.com/358109
That said, I had a Frisbee tournament in Park City last Saturday. It went well. We actually only went 2-4. We lost 2 games by 1 point and another one by 2 points. They were all really close. What we didn’t expect when we first arrived was to play 6 games in a row. After the first game our team captain came over and said that we had 6 games in a row and no bye times. So what does that translate to? Well, it’s about 9 hours in all. So 9 hours, 10 miles, 100+ jumps, and 30+ dives later we all hobbled off the playing fields feeling…. great! Some would say that we have some mental problem. I don’t think any of us would disagree with you.
I visited home this weekend which meant a couple of things. I got to follow the Olympics more closely. I went to a couple of wedding receptions. And I hung out with the Trio! The Trio is slightly altered since I last left it back in January. Both of them have girlfriends now. So that meant that while we were in all our awesomeness Dallin and Brock had girls in their arms. Luckily these girls don’t put a hamper on anything. And luckily Eliza was there to relieve me of my status as a 5th wheel.
To the Olympics. I saw two historic things happen this weekend. Both were impressive, but one was tainted. We’ll start with the perfect one and then I’ll step on to my soap box. Michael Phelps as we all know won 8 gold medals. That is a feat. Pure and simple. The crazy thing is that in 7 of those races he set a world record, and in all 8 he got a personal best. That means that every race he raced in the finals was the best race of his life. Talk about pushing yourself. I spent my whole senior year trying to best my personal record in the mile and only managed to break it once. By one second. And that was it. This guy did it 8 times in one week! Wow. I need to get some of whatever he ate in the morning.
The other amazing thing that happened was that the world record in the 100 meter sprint was broken. Usain Bolt broke his own world record bringing it from 9.72 to 9.69. This was a stacked race as well. 6 of the 8 runners ran under 10 seconds. Now, here is my problem with the race. Bolt started out a bit slow. He was the 7th man out of the blocks. Then his long legs kicked in and he blew past everyone and with 20 meter to go he had a good 10 foot lead on everyone. So what does he do? He spreads his arms out, looks around, pounds his chest and starts gloating as he cruises in to a 9.69 finish ahead of everyone else. That’s just bad sportsmanship. And think, what if he had run all the way through. He may have been able to run in the 9.5’s. He could have eclipsed the world record. But it was more important to him to gloat and receive praise and glory. So as he danced around the track, millions of kids watched and started idolizing and taking mental notes about how one should act towards other people. So here are the rules that have been taught: Rule one: Make sure everyone knows that you are better than them. Rule 2: When you have established that you are better than everyone else, make sure that your conduct afterwards brings all the focus to you and at the same time rubs it in the face of everyone else.
So much for sportsmanship. Track and Field just barely got out of the cross fire from doping scandals and now when people start looking at it again as a respectable sport we have this. Well congrats to Usain Bolt, it was an amazing race regardless. So much for class though.
