Friday, September 03, 2004

reality overload

it was the olympics men's gymnastics finals. russian alexei nemov, the defending champion, had just completed a stunning performance on the horizontal bar and was beaming into the adoring crowd.

the adoration soon turned to boos once the scores were released. his score of 9.725 left him in third place at the moment, and the audience thought it left much to be desired. after all, the guy did wow the crowd and hey, 6 catch-and-release maneuvers!

the crowd showed their utmost displeasure over the decision and the judges were pressed into awarding nemov an upped score of 9.762, which didn't help his standings at all. once again, the crowd responded angrily to this and nemov had to get up to calm them down.

i was pretty angry at the judges too. not for shortchanging nemov, which i'm sure they didn't, but actually yielding to the crowd's demands. what has the world come to if the judges at the olympics are not doing the actual judging? no one in that crowd has been judging gymnastics events on an annual basis. no one in that crowd has ever sat on a panel of judges for an olympics event.

and no one in that crowd respected the decision made by that group of people who know more about gymnastics than we know about victoria beckham's pregnancy.

i was disgusted by that scene. and i blame it all on reality television. we are so attuned to having our opinions decide the fate of others that the result of this is people at an international sporting event thinking they can help a guy get a medal just by showing disapproval over the awarded score! just what made them think that? the petty power we get these days by determining who gets the recording contract?

there are way too many reality shows on tv. each one has people kicked off because of votes, screams, underwear, whatever. it's power to the people. we get to choose. i didn't like how that singapore idol contestant overdid the vibrato, so i didn't vote for him. and yes! he didn't get through! he never deserved to anyway. i'm so glad christopher did. he's so cute.

so just because we can do that in our living rooms, people have got it into their heads that it's acceptable to do that at an international sporting event where every point determines how much an athelete is going to get in sponsorship for his training so that he can put food on the table for his wife and kids.

it's ridiculous!

we're living in a reality overload, where things have suddenly become so weird that it's almost unbelievable. like a scripted reality show.

[ read more about the incident. the message board comments are pretty interesting too. ]

lishun at 10:02 PM

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