Bent Corner

Angel Valodia Matos, Cuban taekwondo Olympian has been banned from taekwondo competitions for life for purposely kicking an Olympian referee in the mouth.

Evidently that’s not allowed. Imagine that.

Matos had just been been disqualified after taking too much time out for an injury in the middle of his fight against the world silver medalist, Aman Chilmanov, of Kazakhstan.

Kazakhstan? Isn’t that where Borat is supposed to be from?

I’m not an expert in human physiology, but it seems to me that if you are physically capable of kicking a referee in the mouth, you cannot be too injured.

I didn’t know that you even could be disqualified from Olympic taekwondo. I just assumed that Olympic taekwondo matches were fought to the death. Like they should be.

Yahoo’s Olympics blogger Chris Chase is ticked off that NBC is showing some of the Olympic events in Beijing on “tape delay”. Not that they still use magnetic tape to record sporting events or anything else for that matter. How old is Chris Chase? When he wants to make a phone call, does he “dial” the number? When he wants to listen to music, does he grab his Walkman? Does he write his blog on a manual typewriter? Is his car powered with steam?

Chris Chase wrote:

Tonight’s swimming finals with Michael Phelps, Dara Torres and Katie Hoff were not shown live in the Mountain or Pacific time zones, nor will they be shown for the entirety of the competition. NBC will instead run the east coast feed three hours later; at 8:00 p.m. PT. So, at the moment (midnight on the east coast), viewers on the other side of the country still haven’t seen Phelps shatter his own world record in the 400-meter individual medley.

The day I feel sorry for sports fans on the left coast is the day alien lifeforms have taken over my body. The ones that look like worms and embed themselves in your brain stem and make you say and do kooky things.

I don’t get to watch many Big Time sporting events. The reason? Two reasons actually; I work for a living and I live on the east coast.

To make viewing optimal for people living out on the west coast, most major sporting events don’t start until after 9:00 p.m. on the right side of the country. They do this so the folks out on the west coast can watch the event on TV after they get home for work. They don’t care that people on the east coast — people like me — have to stay up past midnight to finish watching. If you’re unemployed, retired, or sell drugs for a living, it’s really no big deal. If you are none of the above, it sucks.

So people out of the west coast don’t get to watch it live when Michael Phelps sets a new record? I don’t get to watch the World Series, NBA Championships, Monday Night Football, or the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship final.

Consider us even.

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.