This began life as a posting on 2 fora (er - that was the 'accurate' plural of forum before the internet age made it 'forums' ) of tv.com, but I have found that even posting about it fails fully to express my horror, so I am indulging in a genuine rant.
In the UK, only the BBC in its various digital forms is showing the 2008 Olympics. Until today I have managed to avoid any boxing events by 'pressing the red button'. Today however, I wished to see the events following it, and thus compromised by leaving the commentary to alert me to when it was over, whilst I got busy on the computer.
Alas for good intentions! I didn't watch, but still came away in fury. I don't want to offend anybody, but I have long found it shocking that people could consider this brutality to be a sport. I mentioned on both fora(ums) that my revulsion had been heighted, but not caused by my experience of an unprovoked brain haemorrhage stroke a few years back. I'll add here that there were many (medics and laymen) who considered my survival to have been a miracle. I am left with slight physical disability - an inability to balance means that I have to walk with a stick or topple over at every second step - but having hovered in a coma for 3 weeks, I got off very lightly. Except that it is a permanent brain injury, which hasn't been fun - I had to re-learn how to walk, talk, read, write and use the 'private offices'.
Hence my fury that people can imagine that the wilful brain injury of others is something to be enjoyed as a sport. Hello people? A 'knock out' win involves putting out the working of another's brain (supposedly temporarily). How is this sport? It is a pre-historic blood lust on a par with making smoking an Olympic sport.
Smoking isn't illegal and we are individually free to indulge in it if we wish, but increasingly not in public and never cheered on by baying crowds watching and enjoying our dance with high blood pressure, persistent cough, emphysema, lung cancer or death.
Boxing is not sport, and ought to be if not illegal, at least relegated to a hole-in-the-corner, behind-closed-doors pastime.