The Tool Shed: Olympic Idiocy

For a week or so over the summer, while I was completely ignoring the Olympics because they’re boring*, you reminded Russia why we won the Cold War, plus scared the bejeezus out of the Axis of Evil: America breeds some superhuman freaks who not only look fine in Speedos but also take home eight gold medals with them.  Do you really want to mess with this, Cuba? I didn’t think so.

So we kindly forgot about your incident with the driving under the influence and moved on to celebrating the fact that You Are Way Awesome. And by we, I mean Kelloggs, Subway, Speedo, Mazda, Visa, and other companies clamoring for celebrity endorsements, along with pretty much all of serious sports journalism.

It was working out pretty well for you, with the fame and the fortune and the ladies and the whatnot. But then while your mother penned and hawked a book about raising a successful child with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, you got all disorderly again. There were tales of wild partying, with drunken pictures surfacing from Vegas.  Mild embarrassment, sure, but who hasn’t been photographed with his hand on a stripper’s ass, right?

Problem is, you just don’t learn discretion, son. You stepped it up a notch, partying at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, and soon pictures of you inhaling from a bong appeared in a tabloid. Whoops. 

A three month suspension from swimming—which just ended, not that you noticed—followed. You apologized, like you should. But you also moped and whined like a little bitch about the difficulties of living life in the public eye, like anyone feels terribly sorry that you can’t just hit a raging kegger on a random college campus and smoke pot in peace.

“There were days I would just come and warm up and say, ‘I’m not feeling it.’ I would just go home. If I wanted to swim slow, I would swim slow. If I didn’t want to come [to practice], I didn’t come. If I woke up and didn’t feel like going in and working out, I would stay in bed and watch TV.”

Must be rough, exchanging complete anonymity for millions of dollars and world records.  Poor guy.

So, you know, I want to like you, but I just can’t quite do it. Here’s what I can do: induct you into the JSF Tool Shed. It’s no gold medal, but it’s kind of a big deal.

*No, I’m sorry, you’re wrong. They are.