The 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics Discussion!

[Superfluous Crow]

Xev, how does it make your gaming system more accurate? Unless you are talking about a gambling system :p
And E_E, again, there is reason to do sports or DnD, but little reason to watch either of them without participating.
And it's true that some sports have more to them than others. Martial arts (summer olympics I guess) and performance sports like skating all require both talent, skill, balance, and contemplations on how to display it properly. Other sportsmen just do things. (I don't know if that made sense to you).
And the body is important. We are not exactly discarnate. But a form is something we have in common with everything else living known to exist and thus it hardly makes us more human (although, as you say, lack of a body would make us decidedly inhuman). Humanity is just as much craftsmanship, creation, society, intelligence, art and imagination and many other things and most of these things are neither appreciated nor worshipped as much as sports.
But there is far, far worse in the field of sports as I've mentioned. Tour de France springs to mind. That I actually dislike. Cycling has like five minutes of intensity at the most...

 
To summarize my concerns:
- Sports is (in general) not terribly interesting to watch
- I don't appreciate sportsmen as modern idols.
- It is less about physical excellence, and more about national competition.

[spoiler=A digression on soccer as a sport]Soccer is really big here (and in most of Europe), and that's all about money, team loyalty, big fields and people running around aimlessly waiting for somebody to pass them the ball so they can have their moment of glory (screw teamplay). There is no competition in that; too many things factor in to talk about whether somebody is slightly better or not. That's the kind of sport I'm not much for.
[/spoiler]

[Ishmayl-Retired]

I understand not watching sports.  I'm not a big sports fan.  In fact, I only follow sports every two years, when the Olympics comes around.

I agree that an athlete is not a hero like Nelson Mandela or Jonas Salk.  Few people are.  It can be argued that they do not "contribute," though I find this dubious - plenty of athletes use their money for charitable purposes, and while the "role model" thing is overplayed I do think there is a value in children seeing the positive outcomes of a life of dedication and perseverance.

The primary reason why I follow the Olympics, however, is that I am a Humanist.  I do not mean this in the sense of the strident debate in our culture about religion and science, though it may have spiritual and religious meaning; I mean it in the sense that I, as a human, believe that I will be happiest and healthiest if I deny self-loathing and inadequacy and embrace my biological identity along with everything it entails.  I do not like the phrase "nobody's perfect" because it defines perfection as something non-human.  As a human, I see no reason to acknowledge such a standard.  There is a sublimity within the human character and form that is worth exploring, worth pursuing, worth knowing as fully as we can know it.  It is the source of our art and our ugliness, our pride and our shame.  To be a fully realized human is to accept these things with humility, but never guilt.

We are not just intellectual creatures.  We have a body as well as a mind.  Philosophies that try to reduce us to minds, rational or irrational, are innately flawed.  We are not Manichean dualities, but whole people.  We must not fall into the trap of seeing intellectual achievement as excellent and physical achievement as worthless; that is fundamentally anti-human.  Any humanist - that is to say, anyone with an incurable fascination with what it means to be human - must, I believe, also have respect and awe for the physical nature of our form, the intricate machinery of life that has created in us tremendous ability and potential.  Whether you believe we were created as we are or are the products of an inexorable and unending process of natural development, you should acknowledge how astonishing this thing called the human body is.

I watch the Olympics because it is a celebration of both the physical aspect of humanity and the determination and drive that define us.  It is, in its better moments, a glimpse of the beauty of man.  Commercialization, scandal, and tragedy will always be there to try to deprive us of that glimpse, but it has not yet faded.  I hope it never will.

Well spoken.  Nothing else to contribute here, I just really like what you said (especially the bolded part).