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#100. The Substandard on the Olympics
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Dudes Chatting — Winter Olympics: A micro-episode debate on the Pyeongchang Winter Games. JVL is an Olympics maximalist: he loves any sport where genuine stakes and adversity are on the line, and defends even the obscure events. Sonny draws a hard line against judged events (figure skating, ice dancing, freestyle skiing), arguing that any competition decided by judges rather than a clock or a scoreboard is not a real sport. Vic sides mostly with Sonny on judged events. The guys reveal their preferred Olympic sports: Vic picks biathlon (shooting + cross-country skiing = the most demanding combination imaginable), Sonny picks luge (pure speed and danger), and JVL is happy to watch anything. They close on a riff about the famously dissolute Olympic Village and what they would do if hypothetically sent as journalists.
Full transcript
Guest00:00:00And now, the moment this crowd has been waiting for, and how is this going to work? Completely different skaters, known to be enemies of one another, combining to be the first male-male pair team in the history of the sport. Either the locked-in, technical style of McElroy will not mesh with Michael's improvisations, or they create great music together and reinvent the sport in their own image.
Vic00:00:30Hello, and welcome to another micro-episode of The Substandard, sponsored by Quip Electric Toothbrush and Casper Mattress. I'm Victor Matus, along with Jonathan V. Last and Sonny Bunch. Just a quick reminder that full episodes of The Substandard are available every Thursday at 11 a.m. Gentlemen, it's Olympics time. Have you been following some of it, all of it, or none of it? Sonny Bunch?
Sonny00:00:53None. The Olympics, the Summer Olympics are tolerable, the Winter Olympics are trash. And sports are for children. And I don't understand why any adult would be excited by the pageantry.
Vic00:01:08Well, that's funny you say that. My daughter is very excited for all things Winter Olympics. She thinks it's the greatest thing. I've watched some of it. JVL.
JVL00:01:17So here's a question. Does she have gendered preferences? Is she all just figure skating? Figure skating, figure skating, figure skating.
Vic00:01:25You know what? She likes figure skating and snowboarding.
JVL00:01:28Which flavor? Which flavor of snowboarding? Does she like the slope style? Or the snow cross?
Vic00:01:35With the various obstacles. What is that? You know, you go through... That's slope style. Slope style, yeah.
JVL00:01:39But the one snow cross is when they have like four or five snowboarders together. Yes, that's crazy. At the same time. I don't think we've...
Vic00:01:45Which is nuts. We haven't seen that yet, so... It hasn't been yet. Yeah, that's right. And I mean, right now there's still heat going on and stuff like that. I mean, I guess there's some medals being handed out already. Oh, yeah. But, you know, it's happening all so fast.
JVL00:01:56It's for shizzle, dude.
Vic00:01:57Yeah, okay. So tell me, what do you... JVL, you're a... I'm a fan, then.
JVL00:02:01I love it. I love it. I love the Olympics. I love the... I celebrate their entire catalog.
Vic00:02:05Have you always been an Olympics person, summer, winter, all things, every two years or whatever? Here's the thing. I love sports.
JVL00:02:15And I will watch any sport, so long as it is a stakes game, so long as there is something on the line that the people who are playing it really, really care about. I will watch... I will watch Olympic women's ice hockey. I will watch mixed curling. I will watch luge. I will watch slope style. All these things, which I have done in the last 48 hours, and I will watch it intently and with rooting interest and really into it. What I find... The thing about sports which I find deathly is sports where the athletes don't really care. And so this would be... So like regular season NBA. Regular season NBA. Regular season soccer. Like World Cup soccer? Great. Yeah, like regular soccer. Or like friendly... Oh, just another friendly, you know? Yeah, friendly. Just another MLS game. Regular season NHL. These things to me are unwatchable. You couldn't pay me to watch these things. But if it is like a middle school kids county championship basketball game, I can be into it and root for it. Because they really, really care and they're trying and it means something to them. And so for the Olympics, everybody there cares.
Sonny00:03:37My thing about the Olympics, I don't hate it quite as much as I was letting on earlier. But I do find large portions of the Olympics to be suspect as competition. So like anything where judges determine the winner or loser, only the judges... Huge. Trash. All the figure skating, all the gymnastics. All the gymnastics. Anything where you get...
JVL00:04:02Why shouldn't ballet be an Olympic sport? Ballet is really hard and athletic.
Sonny00:04:05Where somebody gets a 5.6 versus a 5.4, like I don't care about any of that. So like all the bobsled stuff where they're just going down the track and whoever does it the fastest, great. All that stuff is perfect.
JVL00:04:18And all those things are always won by like two hundred thousandths of a second. Yeah, right. And so clearly the outcomes are essentially random.
Sonny00:04:26Yeah, yeah. Anyway, the races... The competition, the games, the hockey games or whatever. I can at least tolerate all that, but like anything where the judges are like, yeah, you win and you lose, nonsense.
JVL00:04:40How about moguls, which is the worst of both worlds? Moguls, they give for half your scores how fast you get down and the other half is the judges.
Sonny00:04:48What? Yeah, just do one or the other. Yeah, I... Do one or the other.
Vic00:04:51Question. Snowboarders, are they essentially surfer dudes or skater dudes or both? Skater dudes. So these are people who... Probably when they were kids...
JVL00:05:01They were skaters.
Vic00:05:02Yeah. And they carry... Because they're different. I'm going to assume they're different than like the biathlon guys. You know what I mean? Like in terms of... Yeah. Recreationally speaking, shall we say? Yeah, I think so.
JVL00:05:13I think so. All right. Yeah.
?00:05:17It's...
JVL00:05:18JBL. You had a...
Vic00:05:21I want to talk... I have a question. You sent us a text and said you had a question, but you weren't sure to ask us before. But now we're on the air and we have no idea what the question is.
JVL00:05:30Before we get to that, while we're on the subject of judging...
Vic00:05:32Yeah, sure.
JVL00:05:33Where are you guys on ice dancing? Hannah, where are you on ice dancing?
?00:05:36Like the Canadian one? Or like... What kind of ice dancing?
JVL00:05:43Like the Olympic sport of ice dancing?
?00:05:47Is that not ice skating?
JVL00:05:51Boys, where are you on ice dancing?
Vic00:05:53Isn't it basically similar to synchronized diving versus just diving? I mean, because it's different than figure skating. So figure skating versus ice dancing, what is the difference?
Sonny00:06:03Is this like the floor routines where they do with like the ribbons? No, this is not on ice. That would be deadly.
JVL00:06:08I would say that is a bad comparison, the rhythmic gymnastics to gymnastics or the synchronized. Because what ice dancing is, ice dancing, fewer throws, and I believe no jumps. And so what it is, is it's emphasizing footwork. And so you see... You see a lot of incredibly tight, like skates one blade length away from each other. And not triple lutz's and stuff. Right. Which, truth be told, I find boring. The jumping part of figure skating is a competition. The entire competition comes down to... The landing. Like, does somebody land one jump or something? That's right, or fall.
Vic00:06:49At which point, again, your distribution is random. Or have a wardrobe malfunction, like the girl on the floor.
JVL00:06:54So I was going to say that ice dancing, have you seen the Americans, the two, they're a brother-sister.
Vic00:06:59Yes, I made a comment about this. I would be much more comfortable dancing with somebody not my sister.
JVL00:07:07Especially because, in most cases, ice dancing is basically sex on skates.
Vic00:07:14Yeah, here's a question. Is there any solo dancing, or is it all couples? No, no, it's all couples. And, okay. Yes, that's right. And it's sort of like the moment in Arrested Development where they're sitting... A little bit, afternoon delight. Yeah, it's kind of like that. And they look at each other really closely.
JVL00:07:32It's like, on the one hand, I look at them and like, Oh, they're adorable! They're brother and sister! And the next, you feel like Principal Rooney.
Vic00:07:42So that's how they talk. Right, so that's how it is in their family. We share a brain.
JVL00:07:46The Principal Rooney is the exact thing I thought about.
Vic00:07:49When you see it, you're like, hmm. Much like Brady and his son. So that's how it is.
JVL00:07:53Question. JVL. If you could make the Winter Olympics in any sport, what would you choose to attend, to compete in? Oh, to compete in.
Sonny00:08:05Are you assuming also that we have the skills of the Olympic-caliber athlete? Or it's just like, I show up in South Korea and they're like, What do you want to do?
JVL00:08:15No, I'm going to assume that you have the median skill set. Okay. So you're probably not going to medal. You're probably not going to finish last.
Vic00:08:25I got it. Biathlon. I got a gun. And I'm also doing... I'm basically cross-country skiing. It seems pretty safe to me. The other stuff is pretty scary. And I'd be worried about breaking my neck, breaking a leg. It's the Winter Olympics. You can die. Yeah, yeah, sure.
JVL00:08:38The difference between the Summer Olympics and the Winter Olympics, there's nothing you could do at the Summer Olympics that could cause death.
Vic00:08:43Am I single as the athlete, too, or am I married?
JVL00:08:47I believe that the laws of marriage don't apply inside the Olympic Village. I believe that is an exclusionary zone. It's like a force field. It's like the Bermuda Triangle for matrimony.
Vic00:08:57We talked about this before. Or monogamy. I was telling this to Kate the other night. I said, you know that Olympic Village there, you know? And I said, I don't even know. I said, there's stuff strewn all over the floor. You used to say this on the ground. People would find stuff all over the ground. I said, I don't even know why anyone's wearing anything. I'd want to go there and meet someone and make super babies. And you brought this up with your wife in the context of? I don't know. Just say, make super babies. If I'm an athlete, if I find the other athlete, we'll make a super baby. Because that's how it works, you know.
JVL00:09:25Question. Yes. Before we go to Sonny for his answer, just as an, just by the laws of probability, how is it that we've never had an Olympic Village sex tape? Because with like 15,000 athletes with, or however many there are, plus cell phones, plus alcohol, plus the, by all accounts, colligulant levels of sex going on, right?
?00:09:51And free condoms.
JVL00:09:52Right, and free condoms. You would assume at some point this, again, just the laws of probability plus the internet.
Vic00:09:59I think, certainly, I would say the athletes themselves would not because they're focused on performing and then performing, and they don't have time for anything else. And also, I do, I don't know.
Sonny00:10:08But I also think there's very much a Las Vegas-style ethos to the Olympic Village, right? Like, what happens in the Olympic Village stays in the Olympic Village.
Vic00:10:18Really?
JVL00:10:18I think that. And what?
Sonny00:10:24Well, it's not like they're going to, they're not sending it to Vivid.
Vic00:10:29What's that?
JVL00:10:30Okay. But eventually this is going to happen, right? We, within, like, three Olympiads, we're going to, we're guaranteed. And, you know, with our luck, it'll be, like, the Chinese women's swim team. My commenting is Sonny. Sonny, any sport?
Sonny00:10:48Is there, is luge, is there one-man luge? There's, like, one-man luge or two-man luge, right? One-man luge. Or possibly skeleton. Oh, yeah. I feel like skeleton is, like. It's, like, the more terrifying version of luge.
JVL00:11:01As Mary Carrillo famously described it, it's like a bar bet gone bad.
Sonny00:11:06Yeah, but, like, but, like, again, this is assuming that I have some, like, the median level of Olympic talent at luge or skeleton. Like, I wouldn't, me, Sonny Bunch, I wouldn't go lay on, like, a luge sled. Or are they just called a luge? You could still die. Oh, well, right, right, right, right, right. A median talented person could die in a horrible wreck. Agreed, but nobody, nobody has. So, in the Olympics.
JVL00:11:30At the Olympics. Right. Nobody has died doing luge.
Sonny00:11:32So, I mean, I would, that's what I would do. That one, that seems like the most fun.
JVL00:11:36Okay.
Sonny00:11:36Okay. And, again, it's a contest of skill, not one of these judging BS things. Skill. Skill. I don't know. It's, you know. I'm sure it's fine.
Vic00:11:46What about you? Oh, sorry. What would you do?
JVL00:11:48Oh, yeah, I'm sorry. It's not fine. JVL, what would you pick? I don't know that I have an answer to that. It would not be something where you had to jump and flip multiple times in the air. Over a falling away slope of hard-packed ice. So, that eliminates freestyle skiing, ski jumping, the snowboard half-pipe, and the slope-style snowboard. Because those things are effing terrifying.
Vic00:12:16You know, my. How does one practice ski jumping, by the way? Well, you ever look at the ski jumpers and you think, the first time you decide to be a ski jumper. It must be a mess. How does that work? Yeah. Yeah, even from the shorter thing. I was going to mention really quickly. And my buddy, Todd Paldien, who's there right now. Todd, they're working on it? He is working there for NBC. Wow. Interestingly, Bob Costas is not. They've sort of moved on, I think.
JVL00:12:39You know what? I love Bob Costas. I think he's great at what he does. Mike Tirico is amazing. Love. What are your feelings on Mike Tirico? As a broadcaster, I think he is unmatched.
Vic00:12:51I think he's fine.
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