Relentless American Media Rears Its Ugly Head

The Downfall of American mainstream media is showing yet again. With blogging and news websites gaining in popularity, traditional media like newspaper and television must go more in depth to find stories that no one else has in order to gain viewership (or readership). This destructive obsession showed once again during last night's women's gymnastics team competition. I must prelude this by saying I'm not a gymnastics fan, although I do enjoy watching it every four years and I definitely respect the concentration and physical ability they take to perform. Team USA really looked great through the first two events, but fell apart shortly after. If you don't know by now, Alicia Sacramone fell first on the Balance Beam, then fell on her Floor Exercise. Team USA's gold medal hopes were crushed, much to the chagrin of NBC. Of course, Headlines all over the country proclaimed "it's all Sacramone's fault." It's just like the American media outlets to blame the hopes of an American gymnastics team squarely on the shoulders of a 20 year old girl. Needless to say, the poor girl was in tears, but that isn't the point. The point is, it isn't all Sacramone's fault, like the major media outlets would like to believe. The USA gymnastics team is comprised of six gymnasts, five of which competed at least once. Sacramone scored 14.1 on the balance beam (I didn't see her score on the floor exercises.) Like I said, I'm not an export in gymnastics, nor do I pretend to be, and it'll show here: I believe there are three gymnasts per team in a rotation, so two bad scores really shouldn't kill your score. In fairness, I don't think anyone on our team preformed well enough to beat the Chinese.

Regardless of how old they are, the Chinese really put on a clinic last night. I believe team USA needed to turn in an almost perfect performance in every event- from everyone- to have a shot to beat the Chinese eight year olds. Say what you like about "oh, we were only down one point going into the last event"; but the Uneven Bars were China's best event, by far. Besides, lets look on the bright side, even if nobody else does; I'll be their voice of reason. We got second in the world, which is pretty good. We still posted a really good round, despite all the mistakes by the team (yes, the whole team); we did beat third place team Romania by a whopping 5.1 points. I don't know, maybe its just me. I've been on enough hockey teams to tell you that there's no way you can single an individual out for a team's performance.