Olympics

The Olympics always make me cry. I know, weird. The first time I remember crying over them was in 1996 when Kerri Strug twisted her ankle but won the gold anyway. But I cry over much more mundane stuff than that, too, like when Ireland got its first swimming medal. I cry sometimes when people mess up and cry themselves, and I cry when they win and look really happy. At least I've never cried over beach volleyball. In fact I try hard not to watch beach volleyball, but NBC doesn't make this easy.

I'm not sure why this happens, since I'm neither a very teary nor a particularly empathetic person normally, and I grow more cynical about the Olympics with each passing four years. I didn't actually watch much of it this year, apart from tae kwon do, partly because most of the time when I turned on NBC they were showing beach volleyball, basketball, or, at one point, the early miles of the women's marathon. If I were to award a gold medal for tearworthiness, it would be to Su Li-Wen of Taiwan, who fought a bronze medal match with a bad knee, and came awfully close to winning before her Croatian opponent kicked her in the bad leg, then later scored during sudden death. She was a real trooper, but she was sobbing when her coach gave her a piggy-back ride out of the gymnasium. It's here, at around 44:00.