I Am Excited About The Sochi Olympics And You Should Get Over Yourself And Be Excited Too

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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jamkdVGTbE&w=584&h=390%5D

The Winter Olympics are kind of a weird event. They’re objectively worse than the Summer Olympics in every way. While the Summer Olympics are set in places like London, Beijing and Tokyo, the Winter Olympics gets Nagano, Salt Lake City and Lillehammer, whose Olympics would later be memorialized by Steven Van Zandt. If they gave out medals for kinds of Olympics, the Winter Olympics would win a silver medal. And these Sochi Olympics are getting a lot of guff from the haters out there. But you know what, the Sochi Olympics are going to be the best Olympics in years. Or at least since the last Olympics. Or at least one of the more interesting things on TV this month. Oh, but House of Cards is coming back. Well, it’ll definitely be the most interesting thing involving Russians on TV. Except The Americans. The Americans will probably be more interesting than the Sochi Olympics. Still, you might have some concerns about these Olympics, and I’m here to explain why you needn’t worry because these Olympics are going to be great.

CONCERN

Why did they choose Sochi anyway? Sochi is not a real place. And its average winter temperature is a surprisingly warm 52 degrees.

RESPONSE

Okay, so Sochi isn’t a booming metropolis (in Russia, you can tell which cities are metropolises because they’ve been renamed after some Commie mass murder and then re-renamed), but you can forgive the IOC for just assuming that Sochi was cold all the time. An easy mistake! Isn’t everywhere in Russia cold?

CONCERN

The Sochi Olympics are unbelievably corrupt.

RESPONSE

First of all this is factually inaccurate. The level of corruption at the Sochi Olympics is very believable. Überbelievable. This is taking the usual corruption of the Olympics and multiplying it by the usual corruption of a government giving out no-bid contracts, and then putting all that to the Russian power.

For the visually inclined, the equation is as follows: (Olympics * no-bid contracts)^Russia

You say that like widespread corruption is a bad thing. You go to Idaho because they have the best potatoes, and you go to Russia because they have the best corruption. Who knows what you’ll see? Bronze medalists being required to sell their medals to an oligarch who needs the metal for smelting purposes? A series of poisonings? A fire department whose job is to cause fires? Changing the rules mid-competition so that Russian dudes can win?

So, no, it’s not unbelievable. Believe it!

COMPLAINT

Okay, but all this corruption isn’t a good thing. These Olympics cost $51 billion, the Vancouver games cost $7 billion. Think of what the money could’ve gone to otherwise!

RESPONSE

I’m sorry, are we mad that Russia is wasting money? Who cares?! Spending $8.7 billion on a single road as part of superfun Olympics is better than them spending $8.7 billion on Vladimir Putin commissioning shirtless paintings of himself and hunting gay people for sport.

COMPLAINT

Yeah, about gay people. Russia’s human rights record makes me queasy.

RESPONSE

Yeah, it’s pretty awful, right? Well, good news because at some point one athlete is going to troll the shit out of Russia’s anti-gay laws. We’re already off to a good start by sending Billie Jean King as a human-sized middle finger to Vlad Putin. And given that if anyone actually won an event and then showed up Putin, they’d be an American hero, I’d say the odds of someone doing something super gay after winning approach one. Some other good troll options are out there:

  • Speed skaters wear outfits that make them look like a sperm proceed as normal
  • Shaun White pulls off the rarely seen 720 McCrunchTwistMarraigeEqualityFlip
  • The two-man bobsled team has sex during the race
  • A terrorist group holds the opening ceremonies hostage and forces everyone to watch an episode of Looking

Sometimes people say the Olympics aren’t political. Those people are idiots. The whole point of the Olympics is to show how your superior culture and form of government leads to athletic dominance. We can’t actually go to war with Russia because lots of people would die or whatever, so we have to settle things on the luge slopes.

COMPLAINT

I have a generally bad feeling about everything happening. Sochi sure is close to Georgia, and there are reports of a potential suicide bomber making it through security. Also, I’m hearing that the ski and snowboard trails are potentially unsafe.

RESPONSE

As Bond villain and probable Russian Elektra King once said, “What’s the point of living if you can’t feel alive?” So there’s a little danger? Don’t act like you watch ski jumping because you are interested in watching the Norwegian guy jump 1.2 meters further than the Swedish guy and 1.4 meters further than the other Norwegian guy. No. You’re hoping someone falls. Ideally no deaths, but like, a couple funny accidents would be nice. As to the suicide bomber, well, who could have seen that coming when they scheduled an Olympics on the border with a country they were invading around the time they were awarded the bid. 57% of Americans think there is likely to be a terror attack at these Olympics, so let’s just assume one is going to happen and regard it as a pleasant surprise if no one gets blown up. [NOTE TO SELF: REMOVE THIS SECTION IF SOMETHING AWFUL HAPPENS]

COMPLAINT

The conditions seem miserable. There are pictures of it and everything.

RESPONSE

Okay, so the conditions are terrible. Why do you care? Why does Russia being embarrassed matter to you? It really shouldn’t. It’s like every shitty sitcom episode where someone is trying to prepare their house for a big party in order to make a good impression on the girl he’s crushing on and then everything goes wrong. Only instead of everything eventually working out for our protagonist as he impresses the girl with his personality, this ends with stray dogs, homeless people and frozen journalists gathering around the Olympic flame for warmth.

And again, this is Russia! Their failures should be pointed at and mocked. There’s already a ton of ammo.

And the games haven’t even started! Surely more horrible embarrassment will befall Putin. A stray dog could eat the Russian flag! The Olympic flame could somehow have a nuclear meltdown! Edward Snowden could escape!

COMPLAINT

But the dogs :(

RESPONSE

Yeah, this one is very sad and bad. Sochian (?) authorities have hired a pest control firm to deal with the fact that Sochi is overrun with stray dogs. And as with all things Russian, this was handled in the most evil and incompetent way possible in that they waited until just before the start of the Olympics to do anything and are now planning on killing them all. Everyone with a soul likes dogs, and while some nice people are doing everything they can to save some dogs, the fact remains that Vladimir Putin has kicked off his Olympics with a dog genocide. But we’ll have the last laugh when a gay figure skater wins gold by performing his routine to a “Who Let The Dogs Out/It’s Raining Men” medley.

CONCLUSION

Hopefully that got you excited about these Olympics. Yes, it’s bogus that Russia–a depressing, corrupt, sometimes evil place–was awarded the Olympics in the first place. But we’re going to go there and beat them at sports and ruin the stuff that they haven’t already ruined for themselves. Remember how fun it was to go into China and win the medal count in their backyard? All the genetically-engineered high divers in China couldn’t make up for how awesome we are at basketball. Russia will be like that, except instead of a worthy adversary, we have the husk of a former empire that has somehow managed to become more evil as it became less relevant. And we’re going to destroy them at all sorts of ice dancing events and it’s gonna be great.

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