Too Much Torque

I love the Olympics. I love them more than the average person does. I read profiles of athletes weeks beforehand, follow the medal predictions, keep up with the latest doping accusations and other controversies, and even post a countdown next to my bathroom mirror starting a month out. I love the Olympics.

This year is no different. One of the top gymnasts on Team USA (the one who just snagged the All Around Gold Medal) is from North Texas, and I'm hoping that when she comes home I will bump into her "accidentally" at the neighborhood Tom Thumb so I can tell her what a kick ass job she did on the uneven bars. But alas, I'm cheap, which means I don't have cable, which means I only receive television signals via the $20 Wal-Mart antenna wrapped in foil on my TV, which means I DON'T GET RECEPTION FOR NBC, which means when I turn on the Olympics, all I see are fuzzy colored blobs flipping through the static while the announcer raves about "the most incredible routine she's ever seen." I might have cried just a little bit. So, on the off chance that I find myself at my parents' house during Prime Time, I am glued to the television, because not only do they have cable, they have 700 channels of Olympic goodness.

I was talking the other day with my step-Dad about my excitement for the Synchronized Diving events coming up, and he asked me what in the world Synchronized Diving was. I explained that, to the best of my knowledge, it was two people diving in a synchronized fashion (which is impressive, considering I have lots of trouble getting into a pool gracefully even without trying to be the mirror image of an Olympic Athlete). So, that evening, we all sat down as a quasi-family to watch the event. Two dives in, my step-father makes the following comments: "Oh wow, that's a shame. Her form was just so bad there. Yeah, look at her feet. And the other one's torque is off. They won't score well."

What just happened?

This man, who knows as much about synchronized diving (or diving in general for that matter) as a blind ground squirrel, was acting like he had once been the freaking Assistant Coach for Team Germany. The funny thing is that he didn't think it was unusual at all. I looked at him with the question "What the hell are you doing?" plainly visible in my face, and he just nodded and repeated, "Her torque was off. That'll cost them." Sure enough, that damn torque cost them the gold medal, and our beloved Team USA ended up with a silver medal.

For just a moment that evening, I felt like I was in the Bourne Identity, Olympics-Style. My step-father, by day a normal, somewhat mild-mannered builder, was actually a world-class Synchronized Diving Coach. For us? For the Russians? The Germans? Who did he really work for? Little did we know that his "business trips" or "golf tournaments" were actually covers for hours spent honing the skills of the young women that would stand before the world on the Olympic Springboard. My step-dad might love the Olympics more than I do.