A Salute to "The Eagle"

Today, someone told us here at The Tao that the Winter Olympics are starting soon (for readers in warmer climes, it's like the X Games with Metamucil commercials). Sorry, but we find it hard to get excited about sports dominated by countries where half the population is named Sven. However, this does strike us as a perfect time to celebrate the Winter Olympics phenomenon that was Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards.

If you don't know Eddie, he was like the Jamaican bobsled team, only for ski jumping. Eddie was a top ranked British skier -- which means he knew how to make a pizza wedge with his skis -- who realized if he learned to ski jump he would be the only person from England competing for a spot. A few months of training and, voila, Eddie was the British representative in ski jumping, and British ski jumping record holder. There were two problems. First, Eddie was exceptionally near sighted and his coke bottle glasses would fog up while skiing, which meant he had to guess where the jump was. Second, he weighed 180 pounds, which is apparently not ideal for a sport that consists of trying to fly as far as possible. Technically, there was a third problem: he was scared of ski jumping, but we can't really fault him for that because it seems like about the craziest thing a human could try. In any vent, Eddie represented England valiantly, finishing dead last in both ski jumping events at the 1988 Olympics and developing a huge fan following. He got a standing ovation at the closing ceremonies of the games and was considered such a disgrace to the sport that a new rule was passed (known as the "Eddie The Eagle Rule") that made it much harder to qualify for the Olympics.

So Eddie, we salute you and deem you the official The Tao ambassador to this and every Winter Olympics. Your job is to tell us what happened when it's over. Seriously, we don't care.

A profile:

UPDATE: Part of what, in The Tao's view, makes the Olympics stupid is the presence of a large number of "sports" that rely on subjective factors (we're looking at you figure skating and snowboarding). In our view, a sport is something that can be objectively measured. Seeing who can jump the farthest is a sport. Seeing who can get to the bottom of the hill the fastest is a sport. Seeing who, in the Russian and Swedish judge's view, completed the most aesthetically pleasing skating routine -- and by "aesthetically pleasing," we mean "according to arcane scoring rules that only a trained professional can detect" -- is not a sport.