Prowess

My Personal Problems with The Olympics

Kim Yeji, South Korean Pistol Shooter.

I want to begin by saying, no. No, I could not do what the folks in The Olympics are doing. Preempting the criticism of “Well… see if you can do better!”, I freely admit that no, I cannot. Gun to my head, super villain making me perform and win lest he set off an atom bomb that destroys Eurasia… I do not think I could medal in any of the Olympic sports. What I’m writing is not meant to be a criticism of the ability, dedication, nor training of the athletes in Paris. It is rather a criticism of the way sports themselves have evolved and how they have, often, become completely divorced from Life.

Here’s an Olympic archer:

As I’m sure you’re aware, archery developed as one of Man’s earliest forms of hunting. Throwing a rock, a stick, or using a sling probably came earlier but the formula of: bent stick, twine, and a smaller, sharpened stick with feathers on it, has been a winning combination for eons. Crude though it might have been, with this set-up in hand, early man would traipse out into the forest in search of game, leaving the confines of rustic civilization and entering once more into the kill-or-be-killed world of animal life.

There’s a poetry in that.

A beauty.

A man’s eye. The dexterity of his hands. The synchronization between the movement of his bow and the movement of his breath... There is a tool in his hand, yes, but it is a tool which exists merely as a supplement to his inborn powers. Killing a deer or a bison in this manner seems (for objective reasons I hope to articulate) noble. Even fair. Man and Beast in this scenario both have an even chance. Things are in balance.

Now then.

Imagine hunting instead with a bulldozer. Fishing with a stick of dynamite. Machine gunning buffalo above the plains from a helicopter.

The Romance of it all goes away suddenly, doesn’t it?

Why?

Well, Humanity loves accuracy. We love projectiles. We ❤️ missiles. Of all the animals on Earth, Men and Women are the only ones who throw objects… at least, the only ones who do so with any degree of power or precision. Elephants, other apes, and a smattering of creatures here and there can hurl objects, yes, but… the results of these attempts at marksmanship leave much to be desired. Famously, Chimps can throw poop for example but… actually hitting their targets seems to be more or less a random occurrence. It is only Mankind, humanity, which has ever been able to call its shots. The only species capable of pointing to a distant object and then beaning it with a well-placed stone, arrow, or spear.

It’s what we do.

If you were to ask what it is, exactly, that sets Men and Women apart from other animals, then there are only two reasonable answers. One, speech. Language. And two… the fact that we have a killer arm.

Tigers got claws, birds got beaks, sharks have teeth, and humans have 360 degree shoulder rotation and a brain capable of making trajectory calculations on the fly. A good argument can be made, in fact, that most or all of our intelligence exists merely to facility these two skills. We can talk, and we can hit things from a distance.

Here’s a picture:

These two little guys are how your brain “sees” your body. Their various body parts have been enlarged or diminished in proportion to the number of neurological connections each part has with the brain. On the left, we have a model of sensory neurons, those connections which detect touch, heat, pressure, and so on. On the right, motor neurons, the number of connections dedicated to fine motion control and precise movement.

What do you notice?

We’re all hands and mouth.

The lion’s share of our mental load is controlling the precise movements of our lips and tongue to form words and controlling our hands for all of our complex daily tasks.

That’s why almost all our sports end in “ball.”

Basketball. Baseball. Football. Other football. Racquetball. Korfball. Volleyball. Dodgeball. Pickleball. Handball. And then, of course, all the sports which involve balls just as much but which don’t have “ball” in their name. Tennis for example. Lacrosse. Rugby. Golf. Cricket. Bowling. Bocce. On and on and on. We love balls. And we love balls because what humans like, what we’re really, deeply interested in… is taking an object and trying to use it to hit a target.

It’s like the greatest thing.

We like it so much that we spend literally billions of dollars every year on games based upon this one simple premise. Cats like yarn, dogs like tug-of-war, goats play king of the mountain, and humans like…