Athletes and Olympians

I loved how this piece began with his families view on athletics versus his.  Though his family viewed games as good but sports as going too far, he still wanted to be a professional athlete.  He then smoothly transitioned his yearning for fame due to his prowess at sports into watching sports of television.  The show, “Wide World of Sports” began to spread sports across the glove and it set up a standard for how sports are played and revered rather than a play-by-play description of it. 

When he begins to describe different athletes and why they were so famous, we ourselves began to see some of why athletes are so revered by people and how amazing it is the things that they do.   But he also gave little personal information about some Olympians that show their humanity.  Suleymanoglu was one athlete that caught my attention due to him lifting almost three times his body weight but more due to the fact that he smoked fifty cigarettes a day.

The part that he wrote about the some of the hidden aspects in sports made me laugh like how the world records in racewalking are mathematically impossible without breaking the rules.  When he said, “It’s time to clean up racewalking!” it was particularly funny because no one ever really thinks about how people cheat in racewalking.  The comment about how they widened the diameter of a table-tennis ball so that it would go slower and be able to see better really struck home how tv has changed sports.

This article was a really fun way to learn more about the Olympics before or afterwards