Olympic notes

First, why do women 100 m dash runners decorate themselves like drag queens?

Well, because they can.

Although the shortest sprint is one of the glamor events of the Olympics, it requires perhaps the least training of any event in the Summer Games. You either have the talent or you don’t, and training matters less in sprinting than anything else at the Olympics, as Usain Bolt pointed out in Michelob Light commercial:

The 100m dash requires the fewest hours of workout and practice per week of just about any sporting event. For example, when Carl Lewis matched Jesse Owens by winning four gold medals in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics (100m, 200m, 4x100m relay, and long jump), he prepared by working out only eight hours per week.

The big divide is between 400 meters and 800 meters, between anaerobic speed and aerobic endurance.

So women sprinters notoriously have ample time on their hands for doing ridiculous things with their hair, fingernails, and jewelry.

Second, it’s nice that the home crowd in France has a major hero peaking at the right moment for the Paris Olympics in Léon Marchand, the swimmer who has won four individual gold medals (a number reached in a single Olympics only [I believe] by Michael Phelps and Mark Spitz). He has won golds in both the butterfly and breaststroke, two strokes that seem very different.

Watching the crowd sing the La Marseillaise as Marchand got his gold medal was fun. It reminded me that national anthems often fall on the left or right. La Marseillaise, written during the 1792 invasion of the French Republic by the royal houses of the Continent, is of course the most famous leftist national anthem with its bloodthirsty lyrics:

To arms, citizens,
Form your battalions,
Let's March, let's march!
So that an impure
blood waters our furrows!

Of course, most national anthems, whether originally right or left, are by contemporary standards extremely nationalist.

It’s not uncommon for countries to have an unofficial anthem to represent the other side, the way Britain’s official national anthem is God Save the King:

God save our gracious King,
Long live our noble King,
God save the King!
Send him victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us,
God save the King!

O Lord our God arise,
Scatter our enemies,
And make them fall!
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On Thee our hopes we fix,
God save us all!

And Britain’s alternative nice anthem is William Blake’s “Jerusalem:”

And was Jerusalem builded here
among those dark Satanic Mills?

In the U.S., the alternative leftist anthem is no doubt Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” which was composed in 1940 in response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.”

This land is your land, and this land is my land
From California to the New York island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me

Of course, these days, “This Land Is Your Land” seems pretty racist.