Olympic uninspiration

OPINION:

This year’s summer Olympics in Tokyo are hardly underway, and already they have suffered a fairly epic collapse in ratings, falling to a 33-year low.

That makes this the lowest-rated Olympics since Joe Biden’s 1988 campaign for president when he was running as the “young” candidate. Unfortunately for him, that was also the campaign when he ran as the candidate who ripped off other people’s speeches and gave them as his own.

It turns out that President Biden is much more appealing as the “old” candidate and all of his biographical lies just needed more time to age.

Mr. Biden  — along with his lies — is like a fine, vintage wine: Everything goes better with ice cream.

Here is where I would like to insert a quote from Mr. Biden proving my point, but everything he says is unintelligible, so you will just have to take my word for it. Ice cream is always good except when you eat it too fast, and it gives you a brain freeze, which — thankfully — means it poses no threat to Mr. Biden.

Anyway, the Olympics.

During this pandemic in which obesity is such a dangerous “precondition” and “comorbidity,” getting out there and jumping around and exercising has never been more important. This is a moment more than ever in our history when we need the Olympics to inspire us to jiggle more.

Unfortunately, these Olympics are failing to inspire.

Just ask Olympic bicyclist Annemiek van Vleuten of the Netherlands. (At press time, we are still not sure which one. We just know she is from one of the Netherlands, hopefully, one of the better ones.)

When she pedaled across the finish line, she threw her arms up in the air in euphoric victory — only to learn later that, in fact, she had not won the race. In truth, she was so far behind the first-place finisher that she had missed the actual victory celebration.

It gets worse. 

Ms. van Vleuten crossed the finish line so far behind the actual winner that even spectators were confused, and the BBC reported that Ms. van Vleuten had won. Thank God we have a reliable press!

Then there are all the various statements athletes want to make instead of just focusing on winning their respective competitions.

Even before the Olympics began, one contestant threw a temper tantrum after coming in third place and turned her back on the American national anthem — even though she was on the team representing America. As the kids say, “Awkward!”

The ladies’ beachball team from Norway boldly decided to wear pants instead of bathing suit bottoms because they were “sexist.”

And now the women’s gymnastics team from Germany is taking a stand against “sexualization in gymnastics” by shedding their regular uniform in favor of “unitards.”

Obviously, they missed the memo about how outdated and hurtful the term “unitard” is these days. But leave it to the Germans. They have the hardest history.

Still a tad cloudy on what all this has to do with “sexualization” of anything, but okay. German gymnast Elisabeth Seitz attempted to explain.

“We wanted to show that every woman, everybody, should decide what to wear,” she/her said. “It’s a decision day by day, based on how we feel and what we want. On competition day, we will decide what to wear.”

In other words, women are still women, even on the german gymnastics team — no matter what kind of hurtful terms they insist on using.

• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at the Washington Times.