American Olympic Athletes Showing Well in Less Popular Sports

The power of the all encompassing wink goes beyond our comprehension. If you’re a single man in a dry spell I recommend a wink in any woman’s direction. What you will witness will blow your mind.  They will school like the salmon of San Juan Capistrano. And once surrounded you will have a plethora to choose from. So wink and lead them away with your staff. No pun intended.

In this ESPN.com piece, celebrated swimmer, Ryan Lochte helps unveil the truth about the abundance of salmon at the Olympic games.

“My last olympics, I had a girlfriend — big mistake,” Lochte said in the ESPN article. “Now I’m single. So London should be really good. I’m excited,” flirted the swimming star, who earlier this week blew America’s shot at gold in the 400 Freestyle relay. His counterpart, Phelps, put the team in cruise control for the win in the middle leg. Lochte looked flat, worn out and exhausted, losing a shot at gold in the final lap.

It seems there is more going on here than just locker room beef between Phelps and Lochte and we absolutely cannot blame the old Mary Jane for our downfall into a silver finishing swim team. What is happening here is an extracurricular exercise with the power to control minds and move mountains.

How do we reconcile sweet efforting athletes like gold winning female gymnast, Jordyn Wieber…..

…. with 2000 U.S rifle team member John Lakatos and his saucy stories about sex and debauchery?

“The next morning [After a drunken night],” Lakatos says, “swear to God the entire 4×100 team of some Scandanavian-looking country walks out of a house, followed by boys from our side. And I’m just going ‘Holy crap,’ we’d watched these girls run the night before.”

This all is beginning to make more sense. Current U.S basketball star Kobe Bryant is 34, a 16-year senior to most of the worlds competing game members.  He’s in a completely different generation and now, at 34, has kids, an ex-wife, hundreds of millions of dollars, mansions, pent houses, an entourage and a trademarked capital element to his name alone.

But Ryan Lochte, Michael Phelps and even sweet souls like Jordyn Wieber are kids with a ravenous river of hormones rushing through their bodies. While Bryant is figuring out how to pay off his beautiful wife half of his enormous estate, Phelps is smoking a doobie poolside at his parents house, playing a first person shooter and checking Facebook for updates. Wieber just got her license.

I would wager to say most of us as Americans define our Olympic experience by our most popular sports, making Kobe Bryant and 27 year old LeBron James the perceived prototype of our American athlete. Lending some from of understanding for kids making mistakes on the largest stage isn’t even in the back of our minds, it’s non-existant. If Bryant and James are focused solely on winning gold, shouldn’t everyone else be?

Well…do you remember when you were 16, 17 and 18 ? I couldn’t be at a beach without fantasizing. Shoot I couldn’t be in church without imaginations swirling through me. That was just the way it was. I would have pickled my left pinky toe and sold it to a Bolivian marketplace for a chance at exploitation. Just sayin’. So while we hope our team wins gold, might I remind you just how young these athletes really are: They’re winning gold in other less popular ways.