By Bob Groeneveld
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In today’s world, everyone deserves a gold medal.
It doesn’t matter how good you actually are at anything, all you really have to do is your best… or at least, all you really should have to do is what you think is your best.
The Olympics aren’t much more than a year away, now, so if you want your gold medal, you’d better get cracking. You’ve got to figure out what your best is.
You can’t run as fast as a gazelle being chased by a leopard, or sprint like a gecko when someone opens the cabana door? You can’t even walk fast? A sea slug swims more speedily than you do? And water skimmers skim past you when you’re paddling your canoe? The last time you got on a bike it was while you were watching TV… and Beaver Cleaver was aggravating his Mom and Dad again?
No problem.
Find something else.
Every time the Olympics play out, there’s something else
This time, surfing and skateboarding will be something else.
Surfing and skateboarding…Olympic sports. Who’d o’ thunk it?
Okay, they’re probably not as weird as ten-pin bowling (which only made it to the Olympics once, and then only as a demonstration sport).
But if beach volleyball is still hanging in there as a bona fide Olympic sport after 20 years (and beach handball!), then why not hanging ten off the lip, or a hang ten gingersnap?
Forget the hard stuff, like running or jumping or picking up really heavy stuff or throwing big things as far as you can.
There are people who have been working hard at getting really good at those kinds of things practically all their lives. Like I said, the Olympics are barely more than a year away. You’re not going to catch up with them.
If you want that gold medal that you desperately deserve, you have just two choices.
One the one hand, you could tap into a thus far undiscovered well of talent. For instance, you could discover that you have a natural proclivity for break dancing, or dancing on a balance beam… or break dancing on a balance beam.
The other possibility is that you come up with something new.
But it has to be something that can go viral in a video, so you can convince the Olympic pooh-bahs responsible for signing off on the roster of sports every four years that they can use it to siphon money up to their ivory towers.
I wondered in this space more than 20 years ago why, if Olympic beach bunnies were able to bounce their way into the pooh-bahs’ gold-plated hearts via their volleyballs, why was there no room there for the trampolines that we were all enthralled by as children.
And lo and behold, trampoline is now an Olympic sport, right up there with surfing and skateboarding and artistic gymnastics.
Say… just how good are you at goldfish swallowing, beer swilling, or flagpole sitting?
How about office chair twirling?
Go for the gold!