The Badger Rises
By The Badger | Sep 20 2012
The Badger awakens from a summer hibernation to discover people pretending to care about women’s boxing and show-jumpingThe Badger does not like the Olympics. In particular, the Badger doesn't like what the Olympics do to people. There is no other event which encourages totally uninformed people to have such strong opinions about things they barely even understand the basic mechanics of. Besides elections, of course.Every quadrenial August, people will read one article on a sport they haven’t watched since the previous Olympics, and proceed to tell you who they think will win the octathlon and why they believe that their chosen athlete will break away from the rest of the pack in the second round of juggling.The Badger hates to drag her name into this, but the Katie Taylor phenomenon is a clear example of this. Make no mistake, she gets huge respect as someone who can probably kill a person with one punch, but the Badger estimates that between 0% and 0.1% of the Irish public had seen a women’s boxing match that did not take place outside Coppers before these Olympics.Despite this incredible apathy towards the sport for the entirety of its existence, suddenly everyone in Ireland was telling the Badger exactly why they thought Katie Taylor would win Ireland’s first untainted gold in 20 years. In the end she did just that, but that does not make the Badger’s complaints any less valid.The Badger occasionally found refuge from all the Olympic nonsense of allowing top professionals to compete in sports like tennis and basketball, but not in football, in Sky Sports News’ 24/7 coverage of nothing actually happening.The Badger was not surprised when Robin van Persie signed for Manchester United, nor was the Badger surprised that it surprised people that a 29 year-old man-child, who has had his ego stroked everyday by everyone around him for his entire life simply because he kicks a ball in a way that is slightly better than others, chose unspendable amounts of money and more ego-stroking rather than slightly less amounts of money and ego-stroking.In fact, the Badger was in favour of the move, as it allowed him to time exactly how long it would take the Manchester United fans, authors of many a classy chant calling Mr. van Persie a rapist, to make a complete turn around and proclaim him a ‘legend’. As it turns out, the Badger had not even picked up his trusty pocket-watch before it had already begun.