Forget Olympics: Gladiators Takes Gold for Fun

American Gladiators wraps up just before the Olympics, and the Games will seem mighty dull by comparison, Ben Mathis-Lilley writes in the Washington Post.  Rooting for the team is what makes watching sports fun, he writes, and it's much easier to root for an ordinary joe playing Rocketball than for "mythical, inhuman-seeming champions" competing in arcane events. "Staggering physical ability, in and of itself, is a boring thing to observe on TV," he writes.

"The NBC Olympics team would be well-advised to produce back story segments that are less inspirational and more banally relatable," Mathis-Lilley writes. "A sprinter who washes his car and does online banking is a sprinter the people can believe in. That's what Gladiators understands that the Olympics don't." (More American Gladiators stories.)