I have always loved the Olympics. I love the stories, the excitement, the sports. The first Olympics I remember watching were the 1976 Olympics. It was a heady time for an 11 year old girl anyway, just weeks after the American party of the century, the Bicentennial. I was ready to fall in love with the stars of the Olympics.
This year I got to see my children fell in love with the stories of the Olympics. We watched as two young men held up the American Men's gymnastics team. We watched as a mother won the first Olympic Gold Medal for the triathalon. As story after story unfolded, I realized my children were learning far more from hours spent in front of the television then I had thought possible.
From the excellent stories broadcast on various athletes, my children learned more cultural geography then they had in their entire lives. They got their first glimpse of the evils of apartied, the intense training of the Chinese, and the terrors of revolution. They learned an incredible amount about Australia and we moved the land down under to the top of our dream vacation list.
The globe was trotted out several times as countries were mentioned my children hadn't heard of before. They puzzled over sports they had never seen and customs unfamiliar. We wondered, along with the rest of the world, what lawn mowers had to do with the Olympics and later learned it was the Aussie version of a joke.
We figured out how to score various games and how close times could actually get on a stopwatch. We watched athletes whom were good sports and those who were poor sports and wondered what sort of lives they'd led that made such a difference in attitude. We had long talks on the sacrifices made, not only by the athlete, but their family. We also talked of the problems in the world of women's gymnastics, the physical pain, the pressure and the eating disorders.
Perhaps we did watch too much TV during the Olympics. Critics would say my children should have been out doing sports instead of watching them on Television. Maybe, but not only have my children been inspired to try things they had never thought of (My son wants to try a triathalon) but they have been inspired to live their best lives. Two weeks of tv watching seems to be a small price to pay for those kind of results.
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