When the Olympics began, I had every event taped which pretty much cut down on watching anything else.  When I culled the huge number of hours I’d saved, I looked at the description of each.  If the information described a sport I didn’t have much interest in, I erased it without even viewing.  I mean, so many events, so little time! 

Then I discovered most of the information about what was on at a specific time was wrong.  I’d erased events I wanted to see because, instead of women’s soccer they were labeled badminton.   Please, all you fans of badminton, I apologize for insulting your favorite sport.  We used to play it all the time in our backyard but we looked nothing like those who play it on an Olympic level.  However, it is not an exciting sport to watch.  The only exciting part was that eight players were kicked out for cheating and did it so badly that the spectators booed them.   But, due to the incorrect information, I had hours of that and little of the first soccer games.

This mislabeling turn me to a more philosophical frame of mind:  the way we expect certain behavior or talents or attitudes  by the way we label people.  We often don’t give them a chance because of how we’ve labeled them.   One of the most  exciting part of the Olympics to me was watching women from countries that had never sent a woman to the Olympic compete.   None of them moved up so some might say this proved nothing other than they couldn’t compete.  To me, the important and exciting part was that those countries allowed them to be there.  The same is true of women’s boxing.  I truly have difficulty with women hitting other women, especially now that we know so much about brain damage, but if men are allowed to inflict injury on each other, don’t the athletes deserve that choice? 

What’s your opinion about labeling?  And what’s your favorite sport?  Did you get to watch as much of it as you wanted?