This week is Olympics Week!! A full week of all things Olympics. From posts about Olympic athletes to posts about personal reactions about the events to posts about the pageantry itself, this is your virtual one-stop-shopping center for the XXXI Olympiad. Why not dedicate two weeks? Well, I’ll run out of material. I’ll probably run out of material this week. Read on and let’s find out together….

This is my first Olympics in Seattle so I was interested in seeing which area athletes are competing this year. Being new to the PNW, I was not completely familiar with the type of sports the locals like to compete in. Sure there is always soccer, basketball, track, tennis, etc, but those are international events. One obviously has a better chance to make it in a lesser, more regionalized sport.

Apparently the PNW has a few competitors in judo and shooting, but the sport with by far the most Seattle representation is rowing. So decided to give both judo (W: Marti Malloy, M: Travis Stevens) and rowing (W: Kerry Simmonds, Katelin Snyder, Adrienne Martelli, Megan Kalmoe, M: Sam Dommer, Rob Munn, Sam Ojserkis, Hans Struzyna) my attention.

First off, judo…..

I thought I was going to see some all out fighting. Some true rip-your-heart-out violence, like you would see in Mortal Kombat or something. I wanted some blood, some broken bones, some serious Asian kung-fu type shit.

But instead I got a bunch of slappies poking each other in the ribs until someone falls. What the hell is that all about? No one was hurt. No one was in danger. Just a bunch of nothing. I had rougher fights with the brother I never had than this judo stuff. Did you know that was what judo was? I sure didn’t.

So after being thoroughly disappointed, I gave rowing a shot…….

Wait a second….did you know all they literally row? Like a boat…row. I thought maybe ‘rowing’ was like the British term of ‘row’, a fight of some sort. Instead what I saw were people actually rowing a boat, gently down the stream. They are essentially doing the same thing I do at the gym to work out my back….but in the water. Don’t these guys know there are motors now that can actually propel us around the water? I mean this is slave labor. This is what Ben Hur had to do, and now it is an Olympic sport? Pshaw I say.

Sadly, those are apparently Seattle’s finest: people who try to poke other people in robes and people who literally row a boat. No one who runs really fast, or swims far, or whatever other cool sports they have in the Olympics. Just that.

Well, at least we have the Seahawks here.