For one thing, I have a problem with this exhibition of athletic knacks, with this show of pointless power and nowhere-bound energy. I can get excited on the moment, because someone gets first when it was supposed to get last, because of the revenge-of-the-loser that for a second it represents to my eyes.
But the whole point of these competitions, the battling and defeating, the fighting and crying and exulting it's not in my chords. Prolly, because I find it an even too accurate picture of what life really is: a whole crazy nonsensical thing of fighting and defeating each other callously and without remorse. Well, without the sex, the pleasures of the mind, and the contemplation: the three things that help me to carry on.

So if I see them athletes competing, I just think: "where are you running, fella? What's that for? Life is going to get you anyway, you know. Which means Death is going to get you, too. Don't take it too seriously. We all know life is about crushing the weaker, but let's not make a celebration of it, OK?"

Well, that's just a problem I have I guess. I can find heroic who struggles against the disaster of an earthquake for example, or people accomplishing difficult things that can change people's lives, creatives, nonconformists, or just simple honest fellas who, under certain situations, act heroically. But I will never find heroic an athlete. Again, that's I problem I have I guess.

On the other hand, there are more poignant and general reasons to dislike Olympics. One for all? they cheat. They are drugged so much they all risk to die young. It's a competition among the best chemical balances, not among who has the best working muscles and nerves. It's not like only Austrian athletes cheated.
EVERYBODY does. Not only with Olympics, but with sports in general.

Now they say this guy coach wants to commit suicide and is guarded in the mental ward. Poor fella. But it's no news. Italian cyclist champion Pantani, who is even getting a statue somewhere, ended up drugged and suicidal too, and a bunch of other stories are similar to his, only you don't easily hear a lot about them. After all, the drugged are celebrated even more than the cleaned ones, because they're there to justify our right to cheat.

I think everybody cheats in sports. Everybody take drugs. They just want to win. Morality in sports has been wiped out by money and television a long ago and everybody knows that. Olympics games suck, they are the biggest lie, forget about it.

If you really want to see something heroic going on, why not point our morbid cameras to the folks in Afghanistan coming out of the hardest winter ever, after an earthquake, and under military occupation? They held it out, you know. Just to make an example.

Although, I think we should just forget about television & its twisted quest for heroisms and struggles: even if life is all about that (if we include sex in the same picture) that's barely a way to remind us of it, not to get out of it, at least in our imagination.

Turin is preparing to host Winter Olympics in 2006.
Turin: city that I, as many milanese (part-milanese, for what is worth) fellows, do not know very well. We tend not to look in that direction, don't ask me why. Old, rooted reciprocal suspicions and envies divide our cities. They had their kingdom for generations, and a king who also had the idea of the unification of Italy. Us, we had the French, the Spanish and the Austrian to rule our city for four hundreds years.

(Let me open a parenthesis here for a screen capture I want you to check in a second. The following is the page of Wikipedia about Turin and its history. Please note the part I put in evidence.

Another funny enough, manifest evidence of the structural weakness of the celebrated Wikipedia, as this article explains quite well. Back to the issue.)

Anyway, all I can hear about Turin today is good or at least sounds better than Milan. Not for business maybe, but for lifestyle and general attitude towards life. Always if you like the reserved, basically ironic, filled with understatement northern type.

For once, a foreign American journalist, Thomas Swick, wrote a dedicated, nice, reasonable piece about an italian location without the usual detached-from-reality "Tuscan sun" idealism. Since he writes about Turin and the Olympics winter games, it's no surprise. Not very much Tuscan sun there, particularly in winter.
A lot of history though, architecture, literature. And the once magnificent, always nonchalant italian river Po that crosses the city.
Few excerpts follow, in order to make this post longer.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche settled for a time in Turin, writing his autobiography Ecce Homo. One day he walked into the Via Po -- the street where, years later, Levi's father would stop "to caress all the cats, sniff at all the truffles, and leaf through all the secondhand books" -- and embraced a horse. It was the first indication of his descent into madness. (...)

We drove down Via Po, Elena pointing out that the porticos continued over the side streets only on the north side, the side where the Palazzo Reale sits. "So the king could ride his horse without getting wet." ... Crossing the Vittorio Emanuele I bridge, we took a right, and sped past shaded villas along the Po's banks, well-situated social clubs with rowing sheds and red clay courts (...)

The city's signature building, a spired, four-sided dome that defines the skyline, is called the Mole (mass). Like naming the Empire State Building the Stick. (In the cinema museum inside you can watch a scene from an old Italian film in which a man arriving in Turin gazes up at the great dome and declares to his family, "There it is -- the Milan cathedral!")