Stoa Olympics

People from all over, coming together for fierce days of competition. Bitter feelings are forgotten, replaces by friendly rivalry. All come together in one grand location for one reason: speech and debate nationals. (And the Olympics too I guess.)

There are many parallels between our forensic activities and the great Olympic games. Not the athletic ability, obviously. There's a reason we're debaters and not football players.

But aside from the coming together of different peoples (you know, Stoa South, Colorado, California, and all those scattered everywhere else), there are other similarities between the Olympics and homeschool speech and debate. Don't believe me?

There's water polo, which nobody really understands (what's polo anyway? I thought that was just a kind of shirt), but people enjoy watching because they'd never do it themselves (sports are hard enough with people splashing chlorine in your face). In other words, it's parli. People who don't do it don't understand and everyone who does do it looks crazy.

Table tennis is a sport that's fun to watch because you're like, 'hey, I can do this.' And then when you actually try to do you realize that yes, even table tennis requires talent. Like the talent not to call it ping pong. It's kind of like TP. You watch it, think, 'hey, that's looks so easy.' Then you try to do it and regret all your life decisions. And calling table tennis 'ping pong' is like calling TP 'toilet paper.'

LD is like the swimming and running. You get all excited while it's happening, and then it's over and you don't know what happened because if all happened so fast. How could anyone go that fast?

I tried to find an equivalent to extemp, but the Olympic events are all pretty interesting. So, uh, I'll just borrow a winter sport and say ... Curling? Close enough.

Gymnastics is the event everyone loves to watch. While no one would intentionally tune in just to watch curling (I mean really, curling?), everyone wants to watch gymnastics because it's fun and interesting. It's like interps. No one wants to watch extemp, but you're lucky if you can find a good spot on the floor in HI finals.

I'd say duo is like synchronized swimming, but synchronized swimming is just weird and duo is awesome.

Vote affirmative, because you'd rather watch duos than volleyball.