Why You Shouldn’t Go to the Olympics

August 7, 2008 | Uncategorized

In case you’ve just come out of a coma, I think you should know something – the Olympics begin tomorrow. In Beijing.

And in case you’ve been in that coma for a really long time, Beijing is the former Peking. They changed the name but kept the airport designation code as PEK just to confuse pilots and travel agents.

But before you jump out of your hospital bed and go running down to your travel agent, I need to tell you something — you may not want to go to the Olympics this year.

There are three reasons you may not want to go, but first and foremost is the fact the Chinese have banned streaking at this Olympiad. Incredible, isn’t it?

And since they’ve banned streaking that means that they are also going to make people wear clothing during competition. Not suits and dresses and stuff like that, but clothing like gym outfits and bathing suits, etc.

I know we’re all thinking the same thing so I’ll ask the obvious question — just what has become of the Olympics?

In the original Olympics all of the athletes competed au natural. (Come to think of it, though, that is a French expression and since the baguette and French words hadn’t yet been invented, to be politically correct we should say, as do the Greeks, they competed gymnos.) So why has that changed? It’s obvious that the Olympics still maintain other traditions like lighting the Olympic torch and having the athletes party into the wee hours.

But I’ve learned from the U.S. State Department why things have changed. It’s all because the Chinese are worried about tattoos.

Think about it. Here you have all these young athletes together from all over the world and God-only-knows what they have tattooed on various body parts…..”Free Tibet!”, “Fly Air China”, “Green House Restaurant have best Peking Duck in town”. Or, in PC language, Beijing Duck.

But as true Olympians, some of the athletes have now struck back. Three of Britain’s top athletes, for example, have decided to go gymnos ahead of the Olympics.

In a British advertising campaign for Coca-Cola’s Powerade drink — whose marketing director said they “wanted to give people the chance to see the real make-up of an athlete and their muscle and power” — swimmer Gregor Tait, triple jumper Phillips Idowu and cyclist Rebecca Romero (that’s Rebecca to the left) have all been photographed naked in their individual sports. Oh great, now we can expect Coke to be banned from future Olympics.

The second reason you don’t want to go to the Olympics is that they have taken dog meat off restaurant menus. It appears these Olympic organizers learned a lesson from the 1988 Seoul Olympics and are leery of riling animal rights groups who might be offended by pets as appetizers.

And just to be really, really careful the government has also scrutinized the menus of restaurants where foreign tourists are apt to dine. Since many of these restaurants are famous for their “Chin-glish” menus, they have given them a linguistic adjustment of sorts. According to Reuters, the traditional Chinese appetizer named “husband and wife’s lung slice” now reads much more linguistically correct as “beef and ox tripe in chili sauce.” And brings up another problem with traveling — you just can’t find good dog or lung anymore.

And finally, the third reason not to go to the Olympics is that the Beijing airport is now one of the largest airports in the world. So what, you say?

Think of this. Beijing’s new Terminal 3 was opened just this past February. And do you remember the huge snafu that occurred at London’s Heathrow airport just a month later when British Airways opened the new Terminal 5? It was complete chaos after the failure of the baggage handling system caused hundreds of flights to be canceled and more than 15,000 pieces of luggage to be left behind.

They finally fixed everything — and this is no joke — by sending all the luggage off to Rome where it was sorted and then finally shipped off to its owners all over the world. In addition to getting British Airways out of the headlines, this also demonstrated to the world that being a member of the European Union has some unique benefits.

Smirk if you want, but that’s become a real issue should the Chinese have a fiasco with their luggage machine during the Olympics. Since China isn’t a member of the EU the Italians have said they cannot ship their luggage to Rome. This is a problem the Olympic organizers didn’t forsee and haven’t been able to solve, so I’d be very wary if I were you.

But there may be hope yet — a press release from the State Department says that Olympic organizers have now requested an emergency luggage summit with Guam.

Jim Ferri