Do you know what is absurd? Some of these failed Olympic events.

Actually, it’s not just the failed ones that baffle me, but some of the accepted one as well.

In the last couple of decades we’ve seen team rhythmic gymnastics added to the Olympics, along with beach volleyball, triathlon, trampoline, tae kwon do and women’s wrestling.
I left out synchronized diving because that deserves to be a sport more than synch swimming and I’m trying to limit the scope of the argument. Now if the synch divers were only 4 feet apart or were tethered together… that would warrant inclusion.

The IOC has listened to talk of adding ‘recognized sports’ such as climbing, surfing, poker, bridge, chess, golf, bowling, squash, cricket, wushu, racquetball, billiards and extreme sport variations like skateboarding and something called half-pipe. I can only assume the last of that group is an inside joke to the preferred ‘training supplement’ of the skateboarders, so we’ll dismiss that one and focus on the remainder.
If you don’t know Wushu, check http://www.china.org.cn/english/2001/Dec/24469.htm

The third group considered is made up of sports that were once in the Games, but are no longer contested. These include Tug-O-War, Golf, Rugby, Polo and Lacrosse.

What exactly makes one of the above a sport and not the others? Beats me. Why should one or any of them be kept or bumped? Beats me. Let’s handle this in the only fair way, the way men would handle most situations if they could – lump the best from every group into the arena, a giant steel-cage brawl and see which sports come out on top in the various categories and which end up dead as a doornail. And, like that expression, some of these events may be just as severely outdated.

The Categories shall be the Newly Added, the Potentials and the Used-to-Be.

How do we rate? We use specially ‘non-IOC recognized’ categories. The categories are
Physical Prowess, Mental Prowess, TV Appeal, Sex Appeal, Cereal Box Hero, Chance for Injury, Similarity to Existing Sport and Comedy. Rather than gives scores with have to be tabulated (and that’s too much work) I will simply rate everything as plus/minus.

First up, Physical Prowess. Simply put, we think the Olympics are about people who look Olympian, or at a minimum, look moderately fit. You don’t have to look like Jennie Finch or Matt Biondi just so long as your body isn’t beyond-i repulsive. Mostly you just have to be physically adept to compete in your sport. Beer swilling may not be a sport, but running is.

Winners: beach volleyball, triathlon, gymnastics, wushu, skateboarding, tug-o-war and rugby.
Among the Losers: Trampoline, Bowling and Poker all falling into the “it doesn’t matter what you look like since you can still do it” realm. For that, they get a minus.
Close call: Golf. While it takes coordination to strike the ball, I believe that with enough practice anyone can do it and its all club technology nowadays anyway. Sorry, duffers.

Next, Mental Prowess. Does this sport require any brain power at all?
Winners: Triathlon, poker and chess. Everything else fails in this category. What kind of frontal lobe activity does it take to play polo? You get on the horse and ride. Honestly.
Rugby? I think having a weaker brain may actually be a benefit, not a hazard.

Third is TV Appeal. Nothing succeeds if it doesn’t look good on TV.
Winners: Trampoline, skateboarding and golf. Watching anyone do the trampoline is silly, but still fun, skateboarding already gets good TV ratings even in the wee hours and golf does well with almost any tournament involving a player named after an animal.
Losers: Poker, chess, tug-o-war, tae kwon do. I know poker is on every channel (including the new Animal Planet’s ‘Chimps with Chips’ series) but poker is fun to play, lame to watch. Watching chess? It’s rough enough to watch a chess game that you’re actually playing. Unless your name is White or Black, chess is a no-go on TV. Tae Kwon Do fails because nothing happens as the players position themselves and then, in a split-second, they attack, and it’s over. This means you have to watch every second to see the action. Humans like a break between plays or shots or hits to relax and eat more nachos. Sorry, but the only Tae I want to see on television is named Kobe and that’s an entirely different kind of event.

Sex Appeal is simple: we like pretty athletes, sports, uniforms and our stars on magazines.
Winners: Beach volleyball (bikinis), rugby (tight pants), lacrosse (preppy collegians)
Losers: The rhythmic gymnasts are surprise losers in that they aren’t women – they are girls. As soon as they hit puberty and start to look like women, they’re long past their prime for the sport they play. Thus, denial. Skateboarding fails as well – no one looks sexy wearing a crash-test dummy helmet and elbow pads. I don’t care how many flips you just did.

Half-way through and only bowling and tae kwon do are minus in every category.

Cereal Box means that your sport needs someone who can stand out and be recognized for marketing and not just on a cereal box – your sport has a potential social representative.
Winners: Everyone but lacrosse. They wear cages and huge masks. You don’t even know which players you’re rooting for. I’m sorry, but a stick with a net on it has a bigger following.
More importantly, name any lacrosse player besides Jim Brown. You win a cookie if you could have named him before I did. To collect your cookie, call your mom.

Sick as it is, everyone likes to see a car crash. Chance of Injury is a factor that must be included in any sporting argument. Watching it happen to someone else – we can’t resist.
Winners: Trampoline, rugby, polo. Any event where you can get dragged along by a horse all over the field can do well in the ratings. Ruggers lose their teeth and the trampoline throws you into the air. Just sit back, relax and let gravity do the work. The best way to cause more injuries in trampoline is to do it synchronized. Two people, one trampoline.
On the fence: Wushu. Do you have any doubt that a sport based upon sword-wielding can’t get a bit messy? If you want to see that, rent Kill Bill. Athletes chopping at each other with swords isn’t a sport – it’s just creepy. Still, I must grudgingly admit, if I heard that the North Korean kid suffered a lacerated spleen, I’d probably tune in for it; thus, wushu gets a plus.
Among the losers: name your favorite chess injury. Other than Anthony Edwards in Revenge of the Nerds II and that shouldn’t count because they didn’t even show it.

Similarity to Existing Olympic Sports is usually a springboard for future inclusion.
Winners: Beach volleyball (volleyball), Triathlon (marathon), Tae Kwon Do (judo), Gymnastics, and Lacrosse (combining soccer, tennis, water polo and team handball).
Losers: Bowling. Is this archery with a 10 pound arrow?
Another loser: Poker. No Olympic card games yet, so it’s tough to set the backdrop for breaking into this virgin territory. Same goes for checkers, backgammon and cribbage.

The final category is Comedy. Wacky sports are just fun to watch.
Winners: Trampoline, bowling, skateboard, and tug-o-war.
Bowling is funny because they take themselves seriously. Tugging? Just to see the endorsement deals and advertising the various ‘athletes’ would wear. Glue? Cement?
Poly-Grip?

The final tally?

Phys Mental TV Sex Wheat Injury Similar Comedy Points

Beach VB + - + + + - + 5
Triathlon + + - - + + + - 5
Trampoline - - + - + + - + 4
Taekwondo - - - - + + + 3
Rhy.Gym. + - - - + - + - 3

Bowling - - - - + - - + 2
Poker - + - - + - - 2
Chess - + - - + - - 2
Skateboard + - + - + + - + 5
Wushu + - + - + + - 4

Tug-o-War + - - - + - - + 3
Golf - - + - + - - 2
Rugby + - - + + + - 3
Polo - - + - + + - 3
Lacrosse - - - + - - + 2

Beach volleyball, triathlon and trampoline maintain their status, but tae kwon do and rhythmic gymnastics should be revoked.
Skateboarding and wushu earn their stripes, but the other potentials… well, they have no potential.
Expired sports like tug-o-war, rugby and polo come close, but if you can’t pull a 50-50 split in the categories, you can’t get added to the great list of events.

There’s the final tally – We add two sports and drop two sports so it comes out even steven.

What could be more absurd than that?

Television’s fall lineups always bring me great joy – since they are so bad.

Who wants shows about hot, young, rich white kids living in misery in their huge houses?
Someone should have drowned that Dawson kid out back in the Creek.

Let me ask you – when they come out with ‘CSI: Laramie’ will the show be so small as to only have two detectives?

“Well Billy Ray, looks like we got another guy killed by a horse.”

“I dunno, Jeremiah, maybe that’s what someone wants us to think.”

In 2008 NBC and CBS will change their names to NBLaw&OrderC and CSIBS.
Law and Order: K-9 Unit, Parking Ticket Squad, Bank Robbery Bloopers.
CSI: Vegas, Miami, New York, Chicago, Dallas, El Paso, Portland and Laramie.

To determine which CSI show you’re watching…
If the lead has a cowboy hat on, it’s either Dallas or El Paso.
If it’s raining out, it’s Portland or New York.
If it’s snowing out, it’s Laramie (alternate, also Laramie if you see a cow)
If it’s snowing and you see a Cubs jersey, it’s Chicago.
If it looks hot out, it’s Vegas or Miami. See water? Then it’s Miami.

I don’t pay attention to most of the new TV shows when they come out, which could explain why so many of them disappear. I have decided that if the shows are any good they will stand the test of time and I’ll have plenty of chances to view them later.

I like thinking of strange foods.

There’s no blue food. Blueberries are purple and nothing else is blue. Weird.

You can buy cream of chicken soup, but not cream of monkey. There are lots of monkeys, right, and they’re bigger than chickens so one monkey could make a lot of soup I think.

Maybe Bundt cake shouldn’t have been named after the inventor of it.

$3.79 for a chai tea? Honestly, how does it cost four dollars to make a cup of tea?

Scones, muffins and bagels are all the same food, just in a different shape. Buy the cheapest one, eat it and shut up about it.

There should be a Nobel Prize for the guy who invented the sneeze guard for the buffet.

Ah…the joys of baseball in September…supporting a team with a sub-500 record.

I love the baseball attendance stats that read 41,000 when you know it’s closer to 15k. I wonder how they get away with that. Does MLB fear telling the truth? I think the league believes that if I know only 24,000 fans were at Shea Stadium instead of the announced
38000 that I might quit watching the games. As if they can fool me into thinking that more than 2300 people showed up in Montreal.

I wonder what the ratio is between actual attendance and reported attendance. I wonder how the Pirates and Brewers and Rockies actually draw compared to what we’re told. I’m sure the league would say that the important thing is the tickets that were paid for, but I’m not quite sure that holds water. If half your sold tickets go unused, wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume that next season those same unused tickets might become unbought tickets?

Using that logic, MLB would be fine if no one attended Expos home games just so long as they sold 25000 tickets per night. An empty stadium, but 25 grand in attendance.
I’m sure that’s just what the doctor ordered.

RANDOM FOOTBALL NOTE

What’s with the facial hair on Jason Elam and Jake Plummer? Plummer looks like a porn star. And someone send the note to Elam that kickers are supposed to be fair-skinned and clean shaven with crazy perms and look like shady Europeans. Facial hair on a kicker to make them look tougher is like getting a supercharger on your Vespa.

This fascination with watching celebrities playing poker is beyond absurd. Recognizing the absurdity is our cue to make fun of it, so let’s all go together, shall we?

My main goal in watching celeb poker is, naturally, to witness a mistake, a horrible gaffe, a social or numerical screw-up that brings these important people right down to earth. As fans we enjoy lifting the stars up…and then dragging them right back down again. As much as we enjoy seeing our favorite Hollywood denizens outside their normal realm, we enjoy it even more when we witness firsthand their mortality. And with luck, their stupidity.

The first thing you notice about celeb poker is the misuse of that word celebrity. Just because you’ve starred or guest-starred or even cameo-ed on 5 or more episodes of ‘The West Wing’ or ‘Law and Order: K-9 Unit’ doesn’t make you a celebrity. If I don’t know who you are by name, face or clothing, you shouldn’t be on the program. I don’t care if you’re one of the leads of ‘That 70’s Show’. I call your program ‘That 70s Show I Don’t Watch’ and so I, by proxy, don’t care much for you either. I care for you even less in your ‘My agent bought it at the thrift store so I’d blend with the commoners’ T-shirt, the brown and yellow faded-and-crooked San Diego Padres cap you insist upon wearing during the entire program and the clever way you oscillate that toothpick in your mouth, side-to-side, like the bastard child of a beaver and a Cylon.

The second thing you notice, of course, for men, is the women. I like women, lots of men do, and with that emerges the problem. I don’t necessarily care to see beautiful women playing poker. Truth told I’d watch an hour of Lauren Graham folding her laundry so really the cards and the card table are just getting in the way. Kinda like the plot in a porn flick – it’s just filler in between the really good parts and you can’t fast forward through them fast enough. However, I accept that if its watch Lauren fold her hand or watch nothing at all, I’ll take the motion of her manicured digits deftly dismissing an off-suit 4-3 pocket any ol’ day.

Seeing actors out of their element humanizes them. We seem them laugh and pose and tease and kid around, maybe even sweat a little as they ponder the play, but humanizing someone usually entails exposing their frailties. Seeing the look of shock and dismay when the bit-part cop from ‘NYPD Blue’ thinks he’s got a flush only to discover at the last moment that he’s holding two spades instead of two clubs isn’t that funny – it’s sad. I for one don’t (usually) bask in the glow of someone’s embarrassment, even if it’s an overpaid total stranger on the small screen. I enjoy the game but witnessing misery isn’t my idea of light television. Trust me on this – Celebrity Poker couldn’t be any more light television if it was filmed mid-air.

I’m not sure why poker has this fascination, either. It used to be that chess was considered difficult, or bridge. These were complicated games. Now we’re suddenly faced with the notion that poker is such child’s play that even actors can do it. That’s stupefying.

If we’re going to see actors involved in sports, why not just bring back ‘Battle of the Network Stars’? I recall Richard Hatch (not the annoying naked one) playing flag football. I fondly remember Mr. T playing ‘Simon Says’. The swimming relays, the running, the dunk tank and all of it hosted by Howard Cosell, serving penance or community service.

I just saw Celebrity Blackjack. What could be more numbing than that? You aren’t even competing against the other celebrities. Are you serious? It’s just you against the dealer! They should just separate the guests and give them each their own episode. Just spend a half hour with one of the now-grown-up kids from ‘Home Improvement’. Two fifteen minute shows with Edie McClurg and Robert Clary might be nice. How about ten minutes with the guy who played the phone repairman on ‘Alice’? Heck, get Alice herself.

If Celeb Poker gets the best ‘stars’ and then Celeb Blackjack gets a slightly lesser breed, who will be playing the worst card games? Pauly Shore and Tori Spelling meet off in ‘Celebrity Go Fish’? Kathy Griffin stars in ‘All-Star Celebrity Solitaire’?

I simply cannot wait to rent ‘John Tesh in Celebrity 52-Card Pickup’. On Beta.

If a star is interesting, let’s talk to the star. I’d rather hear ten minutes of Tina Fey talking to an interviewer about being the lead writer on SNL then watch her mingle for ninety minutes with four no-names, never-weres and someday-hope-to-bes.

Is that such an odd request?

I love the absurd. Absurd things like preseason college football polls.

How exactly does the preseason college football poll work? That’s a good question.

From the days of Aristotle and Plato, to heavy thinkers like Galileo Galilei and Tycho Brahe, to modern geniuses like Einstein, mankind has always tried to conquer the unnerving and unfathomable void that is the college football preseason poll. Somewhere in his den Stephen Hawking is developing a theory about the poll, a theory which explains why teams at the top of the poll, much like light entering a black hole, never seem to escape. Right now Russell Crowe is furrowing his Nashian brow trying to determine why USC is number one and not Georgia. Or LSU. Or Miami. Or Oklahoma. Or Oklahoma State. Actually, he’s on pretty solid ground dismissing the Cowboys but for the rest of them, he’d deserve that 13 and one half inch tall gold trophy if he could conjure a plausible explanation or formula.

I have to wonder how anyone measures the accuracy of the preseason poll. I’ll accept midseason polling; in fact, I’ll endorse any poll taken after week 2, after which every team has played at least once, any stadium against any opponent. This method, naturally, excludes Kansas State and whatever cupcake the Wildcats have scheduled for their first home game.

But the preseason poll nonsense? Honestly, how do you rate the University of Miami, which sends so many players into the first round of the draft every spring that the school must be running a roster of 137 athletes just to maintain a healthy starting lineup of 22 guys. How do you rate the other Miami, the Ohioan variety, which sent their quarterback into the NFL draft’s first round as well? How do you rate a team on the periphery of the top 25 when their best player departs?

How do USC, Oklahoma and LSU all garner at least one number one vote in the poll, a poll that precedes the games?

It’s a well-known fact that some voters select the previous season’s #1 as the new season’s #1, if only because they believe a team stays on top unless they show cause to be removed. Of course, that does seem to violate the idea that a pollster should be voting for the teams as they think they are, not how they were, but that’s what some folks do. Following that logic you could vote the team from two seasons ago number one as well. After all, if you’re basing your vote or teams and players that aren’t even around, why bother?

Some folks cast their votes politically. Barry Switzer once cast his vote for unbeaten but inferior Fresno State in what could have been a political move, a protest move or plain folly. Other voters tally along conference allegiance, selecting their brethren if they can’t opt for their alma mater. Still other votes are seemingly based on potential, voting for how good you think a team will be in December, not today. Neither one of these methods seems particularly impressive either.

The bitter truth on this is voting by humans will always be biased. The way pollsters think 10-0 Hawaii will be ranked 20th while 8-2 Notre Dame will sit at 10th. Take the same stats and scores and switch the team names and Notre Dame will still end up ranked higher. The voters always take traditional powers over newcomers, famed conferences over upstarts. And that’s part of the problem of the preseason poll. It’s weighted too heavily on the high initial ranking. It’s nearly a mathematical possibility to end the season #1 if you didn’t start in the top 25.

And that’s absurd.

Abolish the poll before the second or third game.

Hockey tastes like chicken. I guess I had better back that up somehow.

Think of it this way. This country loves spin-offs. We love characters and settings so much that we want them to have their own shows. I don’t know what the first spin-off television show was. It could be “Caesar’s Hour” which came after “Your Show of Shows”. That was 1954 so I’m assuming 75% of anyone reading this thinks Sid Caesar is the guy who invented that salad dressing. Shows like Benson, Frasier, Joey, Trapper John MD… okay, maybe not all of them.

Spin-offs say “We like what you’ve got going on there, let’s get one of our own.” That’s why spin-offs are like sports franchises. In 1970 there were 26 teams after the NFL merger. In 1976 folks in Seattle and Tampa Bay said “Hey, we’d like to get in on that action.” Same was true later on for Baltimore (after the Irsay debacle) and Cleveland (after the Modell debacle) and Houston (another debacle).

The NHL is the same way. They’ve added franchises in Columbus and Tampa, gone back to Minnesota and Atlanta, entered San Jose and Anaheim, moved to Dallas and Phoenix.

The difference between the two is that the NFL makes money. The NHL does not.

If the NFL contract is nothing to sneeze at, the NHL contract is a big box of lotion-soaked facial tissue. NHL ratings sink to a 1.0 with regularity. You could play reruns of “Your Show of Shows” from 1950 and pull a 1. You could slice up a tin can and then a tomato and still pull a 1. You could show a Fall Guy-Hunter-Automan marathon and pull a 1.1 rating.

But how do I back up my initial statement? Simple – the NHL is like Boston Chicken. Boston Chicken hit the ground clucking in 1991, restaurants popping up all over the place. They were the hot, oven-roasted new thing. Unfortunately the hot new thing wasn’t on the menu. While they claimed approximately a billion dollars in profit in 1993, BC’s problem was they weren’t earning their really big money from selling, oddly enough, chicken. They were making their money selling franchises. Trouble is, Boston Chicken, like the current NHL, ran out of (Boston) market to expand into and the Market became saturated.

The current NHL can’t expand further. Just like Boston Market, there aren’t any new markets to ice into. In fact, the NHL should probably retract. While baseball’s contraction talks were minimal and focused (should be eliminate or move Montreal and should the Florida teams merge or be broken apart), the NHL could really use a massive withdrawal. The NHL could legitimately dispose of a half-dozen teams without much grief. In fact, if the NHL resumed play without Carolina, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Nashville and Phoenix and didn’t saying anything to anyone about it I think it’s safe to say we’d be well into the second month of the season before anyone noticed there were no ‘yotes, Preds, Sens, Canes and… um, the other one that I can’t remember.

The NHL has virtually no revenue from its television contract but luckily for them, they combine that lack of income with escalating player salaries and a slumping fan revenue in Canadian cities. Folks, if you tried to run a business like this out of your own basement, you wouldn’t be in business for very long. With salaries in American currency and payouts from Canadian citizens, the franchises up North start out every season about 40% in the hole.

The NHL is just like Boston Chicken – too many franchises and not enough meat. Soon enough the only feasting in NHL camps will be the bankruptcy vultures picking the carcasses clean. And there’s gonna be some lean pickings there you can bet.

I like the absurd.

Especially when it comes to uniforms, jerseys, sports apparel. I like it when, for no real reason, teams switch complete color schemes, like the Padres going from brown and yellow to shades of blue or the Astros moving from the multi-striped Jose Cruz Orange and yellow to the retro-futuristic blue and gold star to the hideous red softball tops. I like the Hamilton Tiger-Cats’ logo, sitting so low on the helmet that you can’t even see what it is. I like the USFL’s Boston Breakers designing a logo without taking into account that the helmet has ear holes on the side. I like it when the Falcons feel the need to add sleeves from an old Bartkowski jersey onto the modern tops, mixing as many styles and colors as possible.

What would I like most? A pink jersey.

You heard me. Pink. Think Tuscadero, Floyd, Lemonade, Pretty In… whatever.

A pink jersey.

Would it change our appreciation of an 8-yard out pattern from Manning to Harrison on third and 5 if they wore pink unis with a pink horseshoe on the helmet? Would we think any less of a blind-side blitz that crushes the quarterback if it was a pink streak of cornerback rather than a black and purple one? Would your school’s fight song suddenly sound worse than most fight songs already do if the redshirt freshmen running in through the stadium tunnel were pinkshirt freshman instead? No, I don’t think it would really make any difference.

A pink jersey. Not just because it might look good, but also for the marketing. Imagine being the only university or franchise with pink as the primary color. Imagine the legions of men who know nothing of birthday and holiday shopping. What’s the perfect gift from a man to the woman he loves other than her favorite jersey? And a pink one at that.

Just think how many people who aren’t familiar with sports suddenly become familiar because they like the jersey. They see it in the store, are attracted to the patterns or the periwinkle and suddenly, voila, you’ve got yourself a favorite team. Don’t underestimate the number of fans allied with a beloved franchise or school simply because the colors are easier to accessorize.

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How many women would buy themselves a pink jersey? I’m guessing quite a few. How many men would buy one for the woman in their life? I’m guessing quite a few more, simply because they aren’t caring or attentive enough to remember her favorite perfume or which shade of lipstick she likes best. But there’s a good chance that’s pink as well.

Imagine the camera as it slowly pans the stadium, section after section with a smattering of pink jerseys. The color would become synonymous with that team, like Yankee pinstripes, remembered and recognized from sea to shining pink sea.

Imagine you’re the chancellor of a smaller college, not insignificant, but not on the cusp of the American awareness, a school like Louisiana-Monroe or Nebraska-Omaha or any hyphenated university. You don’t exactly reap and sow millions in marketing jerseys, caps and letter jackets when you work for Cal Poly – San Luis Obispo. What you need is a gimmick. What you need is something to catch the eye and wallet of every media outlet and sports nut in the country.

What you need is the color pink.

I’m telling you. The first team to take advantage of this is going to make a killing. As for me, I guess it wouldn’t kill me to wear pink to a football game, would it?

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I like the absurd.
Perhaps like isn’t the best word. More like “enjoy” or “appreciate” or “bathe in the warm, incandescent glow of the silly stuff, regaling in”… you know, let’s stick with “like.”

One of my favorite memories of the absurd is a specific episode of CHiPs. In this feat of modern television writing, the highway patrol is stumped by some joker who commits crimes in plain view, only to turn up later with an alibi. Now, let me preface this by saying the concept of using an identical twin isn’t a new topic to television- it’s a staple. Every great show has had some variation of identical twin syndrome – Charlie’s Angels, Buck Rogers, any soap opera, every soap opera. At some point virtually all adventure or action series feature a twin, usually an evil twin, but a twin, nonetheless.

In this no-doubt Emmy-winning episode of CHiPs, the cops are fooled by twins who commit crimes, one being naughty while the other is across town saving a drowning puppy or directing traffic, somehow providing the alibi. The cops can’t figure any of it out until the big kahuna of the show, played by Robert Pine, realizes that it must be triplets and not just twins. Holstering this Holmesian deduction, the good guys triumph in the end.

That’s just absurd.

We all accept that twins will interfere with our television viewing, usually spliced together with some bad special effect where both sides of the same room don’t even exhibit the same lighting. But triplets? That’s absurd. And not even a little bit. That crosses the line.

How does this relate to sports? It’s absurd, that’s how. So many, in fact too many, sporting events result in a bizarre outcomes. Individual plays or games or even entire seasons that just shouldn’t be. Mathematically, karmically, rationally, they just can’t be. The Patriots comeback over the Dolphins, Maradona’s Hand of God non-goal, the 1969 Mets. Such strange results from such seemingly sensible games.

To me, the absurd of the 2004 Athens Olympics is the marathon. Not just in the Olympic Games, but any time. I point out the Athens Games because I watched, in some sort of temporal wormhole glitch, live, the women’s marathon. An American woman came down the track to clinch the Bronze medal. As she finished the look on her face was a mix of joy and tears and agony and … well let’s just stop at agony. The agony she experienced, no doubt, for having just run 26 miles for no real reason.

I can’t imagine running a marathon. Ever. I mean Ever. Capital ‘E’ ever. And neither should you. No human alive has any reason to run 26 miles unless they’ve been chased for roughly 26 miles and 20 feet by a large hungry animal or runaway truck.

That said, as I watched this woman grunt and grimace her way to the Bronze I had to wonder just how long it would take me to run a marathon and, more importantly, just how long it takes the best runners to do the same. For example, could I run half a marathon in the same amount of time as a Kenyan runs the full 26?

My point is, if you still believe I have one, is how fast could a marathon be run, ever? That’s Ever, with a capital E, that rhymes with G and that stands for Guinness. Please, no, not the beverage to be consumed by frat boys and anyone named Liam, the Guinness Book of World Records. The Guinness website states the fastest marathon ever run was 2 hours, 5 minutes and 38 seconds. That’s roughly a 5-minute mile. Not just a 5-minute mile, mind you, but a 5 minute mile, followed by 25 more just like it. I don’t think most humans could run that 5 minute mile and if they did, it’d be followed by 25 minutes of crying or illness or intravenous fluids, not 25 more miles.

The fastest marathon ever? Applying mathematics, one could say that at some point we shall simply reach the limits of human strength. For example, while many have run the famed 4-minute-mile, could they run 26 4-minute-miles back to back? Doubtful. Impossible? Perhaps not, but really really really unlikely. That would be 104 minutes (1 hour and 44 minutes for those without a Twist-o-Flex). Thus, at some point between 105 minutes and the current record of 125 minutes and 38 seconds there’s a minimum to be found – a limit to what a human could reasonably accomplish, after which the record simply could not be broken any further.

Considering the Guinness Record for the marathon over the decades, we can calculate a mathematical trend. By how much is the record broken, and how often? As training and medicine and nutrition improve, the athletes improve as well, but only to a point, only to the limits of human strength. At some future date the runners simply can’t get any thinner, eat any better, train any harder or be born any more Kenyan than they already are.

The Olympic marathon record was 2 hours, 58 minutes and 50 seconds in 1896. You gotta give credit to that Spiridon Loues of Greece– he could really tear it up. The marathon record drops by leaps and strides for a while, but after 1960, the Olympic and World record pretty much flatlines.

In 1960, the record was 2 h, 15m, 16 s.
In 1992 the winning Olympic time was 2h, 13m 23s. That’s only a 1.5% improvement.

The World record is now 2h, 5m and 38 s.
The change from Spiridon’s time is dramatic, but in the last 50 years we’ve only seen an 8% improvement. The World record was set in 1999 at 2h 5m 42s, meaning that in the last 5 years we’ve only improved by 4 seconds.

With the proper resources, not to be seen here, one could plot the year vs. world record and see how the times progress. Based on a mathematical limit formula, the times simply can’t get any better after a certain point. If the records are broken, they shall be in such infinitesimal ways that for all intents they are stationary. After that, marathon runners will just stomp along with no records to break except their own personal times. And, truth be told, that’s the only record those people should be going for in the first place anyway.

When we reach the magical year when the marathon record can no longer be broken, I shall tip my hat and raise a glass of my favorite sports beverage and share their pain.

The pain of someone who has run 26 miles. For no good reason.