Chode Picks – Olympic Preview

Hello again, ChodeNation, and welcome to the first-ever Olympic edition of the Chode Picks!! It’s been nearly three weeks since we wrapped up the NBA season, and my lazy ass has literally been itching for the past twenty days (thank you, women of Madison!) to get back to writing senseless rants about life and sports, so let’s get to it. First up…

CHODE SPORTS!! Admit it. You knew I was going to start off this post with a little bit of unabashed self-promotion. And since my marathon training season is over for the next five months or so, I’m writing about possibly the least athletically impressive and most frustrating “sport” in the world, Ultimate Frisbee. As you may or may not know (and if you don’t know, I suggest you go back and read a few more posts), I’ve been deeply involved with an amateur Frisbee team this summer. Last time I updated you, we were 3-3 with most of the regular season waiting to be decided. Since then, the city of Madison has been wracked with a historic drought, which destroyed the grass playing fields of the Madison Ultimate Frisbee Association. These unfortunate circumstances resulted in most of our remaining games being cancelled, which left us with just five legitimate games on our schedule. Luckily, team Electro-Flow-V was able to win three of them, bringing us to a final record of 6-5 headed into the playoffs, which was good enough to clinch the 3-seed in an sixteen-team playoff. Luckily for our team, the Chode should be present for all of our playoff games, which greatly enhances our chances of capturing the league title this season. As it stands right now, my team has a fantastic record of 5-3 when I play, compared to a dismal 1-2 mark when I am absent. This leads me to one fair, unbiased conclusion: I am the greatest Frisbee player of all time. Seriously. On the field, I am a cross between Usain Bolt and Jerry Rice. My speed and catching abilities routinely make men drop their jaws in amazement, and make women soil their panties with desire. In summary, I fully expect our team to take home the league title, at which point my adoring teammates may or may not carry me off the field between spurts of orgasmic joy. However, to humbly honest with you, this probably isn’t even my best sport, which has become glaringly obvious during what I like to call “the Summer of Chode”. Allow me to explain.

You see, for the past eight months or so, I’ve been living the dream. My only real goal as an undergraduate student at UW-Madison was to gain admission to the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health for an MD degree. I couldn’t care less about my B.S. degree (which is why I famously Tebowed on stage during my graduation ceremony and told my father to take my diploma home and “fucking bury it”). Ever since I accomplished my goal, I’ve been living the life that every college student wants to: sleeping in, skipping class, drinking every night, partying until the sun rises, and generally just having an awesome fucking time as a 22-year-old. Needless to say, after my last classes officially ended in May, I stepped it up a bit. With the knowledge that medical school starts on August 20th, I decided to stick to a glorious schedule of working two days a week, and spending the other five days doing whatever the hell I want. As you can probably imagine, this leaves me with a lot of free time on my hands, which has allowed me to develop my fourth-greatest skill in life (behind dominating standardized tests, magic tricks and seducing young college co-eds): 90’s video games. This is important for one reason and one reason only: Montee Ball.

As you may or may not know, last semester Montee “Heisman” Ball publicly challenged any brave UW student to a showdown in Mario Kart 64. My sources tell me that he remains undefeated to this day. And since he’s clearly the most popular football player on campus, and I’m probably the most popular blogger on campus, I’d like to issue a similar challenge: Super Smash Brothers on N64. That’s right. I dare any UW student to take me on in a one-on-one game of Super Smash. In fact, I will bet you one delicious Chipotle burrito that I will thoroughly kick your ass. Accept my challenge if you dare. Just know that if you do, you will lose, most likely in embarrassing fashion due the brilliance of Fox McCloud’s vicious aerial assault. You’ve been warned. 

Anyways, enough about me. It’s time to get to the most important story of the football offseason. No, not the recent love child between Erin Andrews and Aaron Rodgers. Not even the persistent rumors about Adrian Peterson buying undetectable steroids from India. Nope, it’s time to get to the real goods…

WE ARE… (STILL)… PENN RAPE!!!

Joseph Vincent Paterno. The one man on the planet who I used to wish was coaching the Badgers, had his true colors revealed last week. As you all know by now, “Uncle Joe” was revealed to be part of the massive cover-up operation than allowed Jerry Sandusky to continue anally raping young boys for over a decade. Luckily for Paterno, God decided to give him a merciful death rather than have him face the atrocities that occurred under his nose in State College, PA. In fact, the only thing more ridiculously stupid than Paterno’s oblivious nature is the idiot Penn State students who still defend his actions. Allow me to put it in perspective. I’ve been a diehard Badger fan for as long as I can remember. I literally bleed red and white. Barry Alvarez was one of my childhood heroes. I will never forget watching him raise the Rose Bowl Championship trophies in 2000 and 2001. But if I ever found out that he had helped cover up a child abuse crime like the one that occurred in Happy Valley, I would personally walk to Camp Randall, rig up his statue with M-80s, blow it all to hell, and piss on the ashes. Some things are more important than sports. Unfortunately, there’s a simple explanation for the PSU students who feel compelled to defend Paterno: they’re idiots. I’m not terribly surprised, either. After all, we have our fair share of morons here in Madison, and I can imagine that there are even more at an academically inferior institute like Penn State.

Well, now that I got that rant off of my chest, let’s move on the main focus of this post, Olympiad XXX (Yes, I’m using roman numerals, only because it makes the 2012 Olympics look like a clumsily-titled porno). As you probably didn’t know, the Chode flew to London four days ago to cover the Games on behalf of Fox Sports Network. Since then, I’ve been spending most of my time touring around the city, drinking gin and tonic with Paul McCartney, and ruthlessly heckling the Canadian Olympic team. Also, I feel like this is a good time to remind you that the Chode Picks usually consist of roughly 40% fact, 50% biased opinion, and 10% utter bullshit. I’ll let you determine which category this paragraph belongs in.

First of all, I’d like to congratulate the obvious winners of the opening ceremonies: the People’s “Republic” of China. If for some reason you felt the need to watch this year’s proceedings from start to finish, you probably came to two conclusions:
1) You have way too much free time on your hands and seriously need to re-evaluate your life (again, this is coming from a guy who works a total of 16 hours a week)
2) England has neither the motivation nor resources (slave labor in particular) to match the Chinese in terms of global spectacle. 
Regardless, now that the God-awful opener is out of the way, it’s time to get to the actual sports, from least to most important. First up…

Olympic Sand Volleyball

I feel robbed. For the past two Olympics, I was operating under the assumption that the USA had the hottest sand volleyball team in the world with Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh. However, after actually watching a few matches this year, it’s become obvious that if medals were awarded on pure sexiness rather than athletic ability, the Americans wouldn’t be anywhere near the podium. Seriously, have you SEEN the Brazilian team!? Or the Russians?? Good Lord. It’s gotten to the point where I can’t even watch sand volleyball at work anymore because it’s nearly impossible to hide an erection while wearing scrubs. Nevertheless, from this point on I’ll be rooting for Brazil to make the Gold-medal game, only because I don’t want to miss a second of watching those babes jumping around in bikinis.

GOLD: USA
SILVER: Brazil
BRONZE: China (boo!, ugly)

Olympic Swimming

Can we all agree to pretend that the USA’s silver-medal performance in the 400 freestyle relay never happened today? Good. I refuse to acknowledge that Phelps, Lochte and company were beaten by a bunch of European surrender-monkeys from a smelly disgusting country that rhymes with “dance”. Anyways, since swimming is more of an individual sport, I’m picking these medals for specific swimmers rather than countries. I know it makes absolutely no sense, but bear with me. Also, because I’m an arrogant douche, I feel like I need to point out that in a 2008 version of the Chode Picks, I predicted that Ryan Lochte would win more gold medals than Phelps in 2012. Add it to my ever-growing list of brilliant forecasts.

GOLD: Ryan Lochte (4 gold medals)
SILVER: Michael Phelps (3 gold medals)
BRONZE: Who the fuck cares?

Olympic Track and Field

This is the part of the Olympics that convinced me to never have children. Rather than passing on my admittedly brilliant genes, I’ve decided that the first thing I’m doing when I turn 30 is traveling to Jamaica, holding 100-meter dash tryouts for 11 year-olds, adopting the fastest one, and bringing him back to America. I’m sick of watching the Jamaican flag being carried around the track after every sprinting event. Unfortunately, nobody from the USA has caught on to my genius scheme yet, so we’re probably going to have to watch the green, black and gold dominate the podium again this year.

GOLD: Yohan Blake
SILVER: Usain Bolt
BRONZE: Tyson Gay

Olympic Basketball

Finally. A sport where the United States of America can dominate in spectacular fashion, the way God intended. Until the International Olympic Committee gets off their high horse and adds football and competitive eating to the event list, this will be our best bet to watch the good guys kick some serious foreign ass. After All-Stars Dwight Howard, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh, Derrick Rose and Blake Griffin dropped out of the Games due to injury; many pundits declared that Spain was the new favorite to take home the gold this year. ESPN.com’s own Michael Wilbon even claimed that if starting center Tyson Chandler got into foul trouble, we wouldn’t be able to stop the feared Spanish frontcourt of Pau Gasol, Marc Gasol and Serge Ibaka. Well thanks Wilbon, but that’s exactly what I’d expect from a pessimistic Chicago asshole. In fact, when The USA faced off against Spain in an exhibition match last week, Chandler somehow found a way to foul out after just eight fucking minutes on the court, while LeBron, Kobe, Durant and company still won in a blowout. So unless the Americans suffer another freakish rash of injuries or Coach K gets assassinated, I think it’s fair to say that the gold is still ours to lose. And in all honesty, I think that this team could compete with the original Dream Team. I’m not saying that they’re better (although Kobe and LeBron showed some serious stones by declaring that they would beat Jordan’s squad), but I think if they played ten games against ’92 team, they would win at least three. 
By the way, that brings me to a point that I’ve wanted to make for the past eight months, which most of you are going to vehemently disagree with, mostly because you don’t know what you’re talking about; right now, LeBron James is better than Michael Jordan ever was in his prime. Go ahead and call bullshit, just know what you’re using the same logic as people who say that Favre in his prime was better than Rodgers. It’s revisionist history, and it’s about as logical as huffing OFF to keep mosquitoes away.

GOLD: USA
SILVER: Argentina
BRONZE: Spain

Time for a few more nuggets of wisdom before we call it a wrap:

- These Games became a lot less exciting when I found out that unfortunately, there will not be an event where 12-to-18 year-old children are thrown into an arena and forced to fight to the death
- Ryan Lochte probably became my new favorite Olympian last week when he capped off an interview about the Olympic culture by giving the following quote: “I had a girlfriend while I was in Beijing. That was a big mistake.”
- The international three-point shot is pretty much a layup for Kevin Durant. He’s a taller, more efficient version of Kobe. It’s really not fair.
- Sorry, but I don’t have a hilarious YouTube video for you this week. Somebody bail me out and put one up. Otherwise, I’ll be forced to post a video of my roommate lip-synching “I Want Candy”. Don’t make me do it.
- CREVICE FOR LIFE!

- Chode Out.