David Whitley: Beijing Olympics have been one big turn-off for this viewer – Gainesville Sun

Were more than halfway through the Winter Olympics. In case you havent been paying attention, heres what youve missed.

Umm … beats me.

Like millions of Americans, Ive been staging a personal boycott of the Beijing Games. The Olympics have always been a mix of sports and politics, but for some reason,this version is just too much to take.

Maybe its that the medals are made out of leftover barbed wire from concentration camps.

Not that Chinese President Xi Jinping is losing any sleep over Americas viewing habits. Hes already won simply by having the world show up and validate this charade.

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All of us nobodies cant do much about that, but we can help NBCs ratings go in the tank. So far, so good.

Viewership is down about 40% from the last Winter Olympics. Thats still about 60% higher than they should be, but well take good news wherever we can find it these days. That said, I confess that I tuned in at first.

The first event on the Beijing calendar was curling. Im not a huge curling fan, but old habits die hard. I was raised on Jim McKay, Mary Lou Retton,Do You Believe in Miracles? and all the stuff that made the Olympics must-see TV.

I also felt sorry for the athletes, if you can call a curler an athlete. Theyve spent years training for their chance at glory, and they get sent to a dystopian gulag where the host country plants listening devices in their toothbrushes.

Big Brother Xi is so ruthless that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi advised U.S. athletes not to say a peep against the regime. Will theyget disappeared ormaybe spend the rest of their lives in a labor camp making sneakers for NBA social justice warriors?

I wanted to give our brave lugers, curlers and Nordic combiners some long-distance respect, but my conscience got the best of me. After five minutes of Peacock TV, I flipped over and watched some cornhole competitionon ESPN. It wasnt as exciting as ski jumping, but at least I didnt feel like a tool of the Chinese Communist Party.

If youve preferred curling to cornhole the past week, thats OK. Im not down on people who still long to see figure skatingand how badly the Russian judge will screw the competition.

So, watch if you wish. I just keep getting 1936 flashbacks.

You remember the Berlin Games. Adolf Hitler, Jesse Owens, the master race, etc. All brought to you by the International Olympic Committee.

A lot of people think Hitler got dunked on when Owens won four gold medals. Historians say that might have given Der Fhrer a little indigestion, but those Games were actually a propaganda gold mine.

They normalized the German state, which had bigger plans down the road. China also seems to have bigger plans genocide, forced sterilizationso I cant really blame it for ruining anOlympic experience.

The real villain, as far as the Games go, is the IOC. It never met a dictator it didnt like, as long as he met the bribery requirements and put the chief pooh-bah up in a five-star presidential suite.

The current president is Thomas Bach. He apparently never read the part of the Olympic Charter that says the IOC should put sport at the service of the harmonious development of mankind...

Beijing doesnt even have real snow, much less a concern for world harmony. Of course, the IOC would be the WAC if it didnt have corporate partners like Toyota, Samsung and Procter & Gamble writing it eight-figure checks. It also got a tidy $7.7 billion from NBC to televise the Games through 2032.

The BBC asked the 13 major sponsors how they felt about bankrolling an Olympiad held in a police state. None responded.

I get why corporations cant just write off 1.4 billion potential customers. Whats tiresome is Coca-Cola and otherscondemning U.S. atrocities like voter ID requirements, then going mum as China marches Uyghur Muslims into prison camps.

But again, what does Xi care?

As far as his 1.4 billion subjects probably know from state-run TV, Chinese athletes have won every gold medal. I just wish that somehow the best-laid plans of mice and oppressors would go awry.

Maybe a bobsled will jump the track and fly into the CCP skybox and land in the punch bowl just as Xi, Bach and the NBC head of programming are raising a toast to the success of the Beijing Olympics.

Now that would be worth watching.

David Whitley is The Gainesville Sun's sports columnist. Contact him at dwhitley@gannett.com. And follow him on Twitter: @DavidEWhitley

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David Whitley: Beijing Olympics have been one big turn-off for this viewer - Gainesville Sun