Sports Unveiled: Snatch-Jerky, Concussions, and Buff Asians

Sadly, I am a chunk with a cold. I am also a chunk who is trapped in front of the tv all night watching the women's tennis year-end championships broadcast live on Eurosport (an excellent event -- just the top 8 women, and EVERY match is good), which means I have been watching a LOT of tv.

A few quick observations before I get back to it.

Weightlifting: Snatch-Jerky & Blankets

I think that the dominance of the sport of weightlifting, particularly in the lighter weight classes, by Asian lifters (China, Taipei -- I still don't understand why they don't call it Taiwan...any help?, and Thailand) is evidence that Asians are often genetically pre-disposed to building lean muscle mass. In much the same way we can see how a lot of black athletes are just built differently to suit different sports, you see this with Asians in weight-lifting. Take my word for it (since I don't feel like pulling up stats). It's also a sport dominated by rising young stars, as today, for instance, I watched a Chinese woman and a Thai woman (I should call them "girls" since they are officially juniors) battle for the senior title and challenge world records. These girls were a shade under 53 kilos (almost 20 pounds LESS than I am...I think) and were lifting unbelievable amounts of weight (like more than twice their body weight). We're talking 3-4 times what I can lift (and they are SO much smaller). It's interesting, and I was thinking about blogging about this in the shower the other day at the gym, because you really see that a 100% increase in muscle strength is accompanied by only about a 20% increase in muscle size. My arms are a LITTLE bigger, now, than they were a month ago, but they are a LOT stronger. I like actually seeing the ability of a muscle to do work increase. Pretty cool.

About snatch...well...I really think the Eurosport commentators can get out of hand. First of all, the weightlifting commentators are hopeless idiots. The weightlifting competition has two phases: snatch (where they just kind of squat and snatch the bar up above their heads and stand immediately up), and clean-and-jerk (where they squat, swing the bar up to their necks so it's resting by their windpipe, rotate their grip, and then lunge, thrusting it above their heads, and recovering to stand straight up -- check out the official website for stick figures of ambiguous sex demonstrating the two...they have the woman doing snatch and the man doing the clean-and-jerk...no comment). Medals are awarded for both phases and the overall total. The commentators have had IMMENSE problems, the past two days, with the SIMPLE (A+B) math involved in ranking the competitors, and have been repeatedly baffled by the extremely difficult mental math required in adding two two-digit numbers together, particularly when you introduce breaking ties between lifters by body weight (ordinal numbers were also difficult for the commentators). Despite their pathetic math skills, they did manage to make me laugh with them and not at them, when one of them made a joke about the other one's sex-life (presumably) saying: "If I recall, you've always preferred snatch to clean-and-jerk" hahahaha. Kind of gratuitous, but not as bad as some of the tennis commentators I heard over the summer (Brits contracted for Indian tv) who made EXPLICIT gay jokes about each other (even about traveling together from tournament to tournament). Hilarious.

One character of note is Tunisia's Soumaya Fatnassi (VC *definitely* feels her pain as far as the family name goes). She it the SPITTING image of Punkie Brewster (I kid you not). I really have tried to find a photo, but I can't. A side-by-side would be striking...she even had a pony-tail on the side of her head. I felt really bad for her, though, because she ended up posting no results in the snatch portion of the event when her coaches totally screwed up the clock and didn't send her to the floor in time to lift (how much does that suck?). It was weird because she's sitting there wrapped in her blanket (see comment, below) and they're shoving all these sniffy things up her nose to make her peppy, and then suddenly she is like sprinting out of the locker room and up the stairs to the stage, throws herself into a squat, and tries to stand up, falls on her Fatnassi, and I'm sitting here wondering what the heck was in her sniffer, but then the luminescent commentators explain that she only had like 2 seconds to get to the stage and complete her lift because her coaches messed up the timing and the clock was about to run out on her turn. Poor Punkie.

The only other thing to take away from the weightlifting that I've watched is that I think it's a good sport for me for two reasons: 1. They all have big thighs, and so do I; 2. After you finish a lift, you run back to your chair and they cover you with blankets! Can you imagine some hulky lifter screaming: "I need my bankie!"? It's to keep their muscles warm between lifts (duh) but I think it's really tender and cute -- and I'm TOTALLY going to start bringing a blankie to the gym!

Boxing

No comments, here, except that I watched a TOTAL hottie named Omar Sheika (pictured, here) get destroyed by a German guy named Markus Beyer on Beyer's home turf. It was funny because Sheika competes for the US (out of Padderson, NJ or some place that sounds like that) and when he'd go to his corner all the coaches were trying to talk him up: "You f*cking b*tch! Hit him! F*cking hit him! You p*ssy! You are a f*cking p*ssy!" Meanwhile there is blood STREAMNING down his gorgeous face. Then Eurosport cuts to the German corner where the coach is like calmly smearing the guy's face with vaseline (which is like La Mer for boxers -- same petrolatum base...thanks Max Huber...work it NASA!) and saying in a conversational tone: "And so you should stick to his left and watch your breathing..." lol. Americans.

*SCORE!* I just killed the mosquito that has been secretly eating my foot while I sit on the couch. I was smart because I saw it near my computer and I fearlessly baited it with my forearm and then smashed it with a quickness that would make Muhammad Ali proud (see story about him calling Bush crazy at Medal of Congress ceremony to thunderous applause)

Shooto

For the last two hours I've been eating chocolate and admiring the tenacity and low BMI of Shooto fighters. Brazil's Vitor "Shaolin" Ribeiro has TOTALLY stolen my heart (even more than Omar Sheika). Shooto is a sport under the MMA ("mixed martial arts") umbrella, and I find it incredibly fascinating and brutal but technical in a way I really appreciate (VERY technical). It is also...what's the word...TOTALLY HOT, lol. If you can get past the "concussive" blows to the head (this is the commentator's description of the types of punches Shooto fighters throw), and the shin-kicking (ouch!), as well as some of the more disturbing mounts (pictured below), then you can focus on a really technical and artful sport, in which every athlete happens to have what VC considers to be the ideal male form (or at least what HE would want to look like). Check out this website for a bit of an explanation of some of the fighting -- it also gives a flavour for the internal debate amongst MMA sports as to which is the most hardcore (if we are using that as a pun then I *definitely* vote for Shooto). Speaking of, does ANYONE but me think it's noteworthy that Mr. Shaolin authored this article about how he likes to go for the "rear mount" because it's a "great position" in order to make the other guy (in this case, Todd) "submit"!?!? *VC fans himself* No comment necessary.

Enjoy! (especially you, mom lol)*















VC

*I would like to remind my mother that in reality she should not enjoy these fight photos TOO much, lest I reminder her what happened the last time she got overly-absorbed by the art of combat: after watching Kill Bill on DVD, she, at midnight (and 57 years of age) decided that she should go into the hall and start doing some of the martial arts moves, and proceeded to crash her elbow into the wall and injure herself. Careful, mommy!