31 Minutes of Bliss That Could Have Been

I stayed off the forums all day because I knew they’d ruin it. I stayed off mainstream sports sites all day because their covering of it would have given away the result had anything shocking occurred (otherwise it would’ve been ignored completely). When the Women’s Olympics 10,000 meters race was aired early Saturday morning, I had no idea what was going to happen.

But I did know one thing (or so I thought): I was about to be treated to 31 minutes of America’s top runner Kara Goucher.

What was I subjected to instead?

After the first five minutes of the race were aired, there was a Jennifer Garner commercial that led to an argument between Orel and I over whether she was hot (definitely not) and married to Ben Affleck (Orel insisted J-Lo was).

Then, back from commercial, there was a quick peek of Goucher followed by 10 minutes of lumberjacks in the shot put.

On that topic, did anyone see Reese Hoffa’s wife? The first obvious reaction was to think, “Wow, I guess it’s not so great to be an Olympian after all,” but then they returned to a shot of Hoffa, and I realized that mongoloid is actually batting out of his league.

After the shot put highlights were shown, there was a quick shot of the 10,000 meters field… or, rather, the seven leaders who were shockingly all African.

Finally we were back to what I was waiting for with five laps to go.

Only we weren’t. I was waiting for Kara and Shalane, slams not Sams!

Elvan Abeylegesse (try to tell me she doesn’t look like Sam!) was being stalked by Tirunesh Dibaba and the announcers gave us little indication of where Flanagan or Goucher were.

Haven’t they been watching swimming or gymnastics? I’m not expecting them to GPS track the Americans like they do in the pool or overanalyze their every step outside of competition like Johnson and Liukin, but it’d have been nice to know what position they were in.

Eventually we were alerted to the fact that Shalane, named after a fictional character in a fictional science fiction novel, was swallowing up Africans one-by-one. Apparently they weren’t very filling because she went from eighth (or maybe even lower) to third and still looked hungry when she crossed the finish.

I think the only reason the announcers knew she was doing well was because they were keeping a close eye on her mom going ballistic in the stands.

And we ended the race having seen more mother than daughter. Ugh.

The finish was incredibly predictable, but of course the announcers had no idea what was about to happen. Dibaba rode Abeylegesse until the bell lap, then crushed her to the finish.

We never saw Goucher again.

Being a distance running fan in America is the worst.

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