Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Why don’t people care about swimming?
With the Olympics drawing near, MSNBC and NBC News have been dedicating a lot of coverage to the athletes that will be representing the United States in Beijing this summer. If I didn’t know any better, I would think they were allowing the fact that the “games” are being televised on NBC to motivate them into treating the Olympics as news.
I was watching MSNBC this morning and they were talking about the U.S. Olympic swimming trials currently taking place in Nebraska. The story was about the swimsuits the Olympians will be wearing and how they make the swimmers extremely fast. This was news to me since I was under the impression that Olympic swimming is done in the nude.
Evidently it’s not.
The “news” story got me thinking about competitive swimming and how the general public really doesn’t care too much about it. Sure, it gets some attention every four years at the Olympics, but not much attention is paid to swimming the rest of the time.
Why is that?
We live on a planet where 86% of it’s surface is covered with water. We live on a water planet. You would assume that people living on a world covered with so much water would live and breath swimming. You would think there would be professional swimming leagues enjoyed and followed by millions. Swimmers such as Katie Hoff and Michael Phelps would be household names.
Most people know how to swim. Most people have spent at least some time in the water. We should be able to identify with what these Olympic swimmers are doing and value the exceptional ability they have in the water. The way they are able to rocket themselves through the water is simply awe-inspiring.
We should care about swimming or we should move to Mars.
