Stardate 20020208.1854

(On Screen): There was a time when the World Fair was a big deal. I remember visiting the Seattle World Fair when I was a kid; it was huge, it was exciting, it was incredibly crowded. They built the Space Needle for it, as well as putting in the monorail.

Probably the most famous and greatest World's Fair in history was the New York World's Fair of 1939.

But the World's Fairs have not been as big a deal in the last twenty years. I think perhaps the beginning of the end was the one in Knoxville, which by all accounts was rather tawdry. Where previous ones had been viewed as a true world's meeting, Knoxville was simply looking for a commercial windfall. And since then the most of the ones which have been held have not been particularly well publicized; the excitement that used to exist for them is gone.

In fact, it used to feel the way the Olympics used to feel. It was a big deal. And I wonder whether eventually the excitement for the Olympics will also collapse. One can hope.

While I must admit that I did watch the Olympics once, it's been a long time since I have really paid much attention. One of the reasons is similar to why I don't go to dog races or horse races: I don't like what it means for the animals that compete. Dog races are particularly bad in that regard; thousands of dogs are euthanized after they finish their year of racing. Greyhounds make excellent pets; they're intelligent and gentle and friendly, and there's been an effort for a long time to try to find homes for ex-racers instead of letting them be killed because they're no longer needed.

By the same token, I don't like the implications of the Olympics for the participants themselves. Some events are worse in this regard than others. Events like shooting and dressage are still the domain of people who also live everyday lives. But in too many of the sports now it is only possible to compete if you train fulltime for years. And nowhere is that more so than in the women's sports, which is to say the girl's sports.

It's been a long time since anyone with breasts actually competed in "Women's" gymnastics. In what is essentially a strength sport, women lose out in strength-to-weight ratio to girls and men. A man is stronger per weight than a boy, but a girl is stronger per weight than a woman. As a result, when you see the pictures of the Olympic gymnastic teams, it looks like a crime is being committed. You've got a whole lot of 13 and 14 year old girls with narrow hips and flat chests running around with men aged between 19 and 25 who are, leave us face it, quite virile. If they were out on the town together they'd all be arrested.

And those girls often have been training for years. One of the saddest things to watch is some contender for Women's gymnastics watching the clock tick and hoping against hope that puberty won't happen before the next Olympics. Because if it does, her body will change in all the expected ways and her career in the sport will end. It happens again and again. Sometimes they try to compete anyway, but it's clear that it isn't possible and these days that's rare.

Go back and look at film of Women's gymnastics from 1960 and you see women. It's quite jarring if you don't know what to expect. Most of the competitors then were in their early 20's. But now they're all jailbait.

These girls often leave their families and live with a trainer as a sort of adoptive child. They go to school or are sometimes home-schooled, and they spend hours every day working out, instead of having a social life. When other girls that age are hanging out at the mall, these girls are in the gym, working. A couple times per year they get vacations to go and visit their biological families, just so they don't forget each other. And once the hormones kick in, the young women (who are no longer girls and are thus useless) leave and return to families they no longer even know very well. Their childhoods have been stolen in pursuit of athletic prowess, and once that is gone there is nothing left. Many of them turn out to be warped in later life. Some of them become coaches; a handful go into broadcasting. Most sink from sight, used up and discarded just like those greyhounds.

The Winter games are not quite as mercenary, if for no other reason than because they long since gave up any semblance of requiring their participants to be "amateurs". The physical sports in the Winter Olympics rely more on stamina and total strength than on strength-to-weight ratio, and in the Winter Olympics it is still women who compete in most sports. In cross-country skiing or in speed skating or downhill skiing, women can beat girls.

But not in figure skating. If Gymnastics is the most tragic sport of the Summer games, then figure skating is the shame of the Winter. There isn't that life clock ticking for figure skaters because it doesn't rely quite as much on sheer strength, but the sport tries to pretend. All the competitors have to pretend to be virginal pre-pubescents even if they're not. But on the deeper level, it is the same: to compete you have to dedicate your life to training, and once competition ends you have nothing, nothing at all. Your childhood is gone, sacrificed on the altar of athletic ambition. You are a footnote in the sports histories, and don't call us, we'll call you.

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