How on earth have I managed to get this far into JALC’s lifespan without talking about the Olympics and my embarrassingly high level of fan-girl-ness about them?

I mean, yes, there have lots of long gaps and hiatuses: nonetheless, this blog started 15 mother-forking years ago (!!!), which means that Paris 2024 is the 8th set of Olympic games that has taken place since I started writing here.

And yet, a focused search of my posts on JALC shows that the only prior mention of the games was when I made passing reference to this viral video from the 2012 swimming team in a post about earworms!

Clearly, that ends tonight.

I’ve talked a lot about all of the ways that I am not an athletic person. So it’s a little bit of a mystery as to why I love the Olympic games as wildly as I do. But even without explaining the why of it, I can certainly attest to the ways I love all of it. The wild artiness that is always baked into to opening and closing ceremonies. The big-name sports (gymnastics) and the hidden gems (slalom kayak!). Yes, even all those human interest stories that NBC Sports can’t resist.

I’m a sucker for it all.

I’m also weirdly unbothered by the wackiness caused by time zone differences between different host cities and my East Coast home. Over the last dozen years or so, I’ve developed my own routine of taping all the primetime coverage of the games and I watch my way through those telecasts: however imbalanced that coverage is towards U.S. athletes and popular sports, I have found it to provide me a decent smorgasbord of the different events in a way that allows me to fulfill my workday responsibilities and almost sort of keep up with the games.

(Admittedly, I do jettison all my good TV habits out the window for this fortnight. Most of the time I stop watching TV by 8 PM on “school nights,” but during Olympics season I’m glued to the screen till 10 PM or later.)

And yes, sometimes that means I’ve heard the event results before I watch the coverage. Especially since there are lots of Olympics where I end up a day or two behind the primetime coverage on account of some evening-or-other where I have a meeting or something. For example, I had my doctoral residency over this past weekend, which means I was way behind schedule from the jump. (It’s currently Tuesday night and I’ve just finished watching Sunday’s coverage: I’ll get maybe 40 minutes into last night’s telecast before I reach tonight’s bedtime.)

But for whatever reason, I find myself 100% unbothered by watching these competitions even after having some inkling of what’s coming. Facebook memes have told me that something interesting is going to happen with Stephen Nedoroscik later in Monday’s broadcast, and yes I’ve received a news headline or two via text about the women’s team final that is tonight’s headline event.* Still, I get caught up in every moment, every twist and turn. I love every second of it.

So, if you need me between now and August 11th,** you can find me glued to the television.

And loving every second of it!

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* Gaia willing, I’ll watch it tomorrow, but I may not get through it all till Thursday.

** Let’s be real: I probably won’t get to the end of the closing ceremony till the 14th or 15th.

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Image credits:

• Olympic rings in the Place du Trocadéro: Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
• T is for TV: Loving Earth on Flickr. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.