Stop Being Dicks: Anti-Shit-Talkers

If you're like me (and I know you are), the last time you watched a swim meet was 4 years ago out of the corner of your drunken eye at a bar playing the last Olympics in Sydney. Since then all the swimming you've seen are freaked out surfers and scuba dive victims during "Shark Week" on the Discovery Channel. So to all the Johnny-Come-Lately, "I love watching swimming on T.V." douchbags, stop being dicks to the French Men's Olympic 4x100 meter freestyle swim team.

Last week after declaring, "The American's? We will smash them. That's what we came here for," the French Men's 4x100 meter freestyle Olympic team subsequently lost to the American's in what is now being hailed as the best Olympic swimming race ever.

The American's were slight underdogs going into the event behind a French team that has dominated this event for the past two years (thanks Rowdy Gaines!). Now you'd think that if you're favored in an Olympic event that you'd keep your thinly mustachioed mouth shut, and let everyone else do the shit talking for you, but the French team did nothing of the sort.

Despite the American's having the fastest swimmer in the world on their team, the already-won-six-gold-medals-in-these-Games-and-it's-only-day-2 Michael Phelps, the French simply couldn't keep the shit talking under their beret.

"Why, oh why, would you talk shit right before the race," you might ask. You'd be setting yourself up for failure. For ridicule. For utter shame. Well, believe it or not, I totally agree with the French team.

You see, I'm a glass-half-full kind of guy, and the idea of setting yourself up for failure never occurs to me. When I do my shit talking, I'm setting myself up for success. Ask yourself, how great would it have been for the French to win the race after all the pre-race, shit-talking drama? To be able to bask in the glory of not only winning the event but also being able to say "I told you so" after declaring "We will smash you," and at the same time dashing the American's hopes for Michael Phelps to be the only person in Olympic history to win 8 gold medals in one Olympic Games. The victory would have been twice as glorious.

Unfortunately for the French, they lost, but that doesn't make them losers in my book. To have the balls to declare your victory before it actually happens is the stuff dreams are made of. Billiard players do it all the time, in fact they're required to call their shots before they hit the ball. Before Michael Jordan made his famous last second shot to win his sixth NBA Championship, he told his defender during the in-bound play, "This is going to sting." You know the rest of the story.

It takes huge balls to declare your victory before it happens, but I believe in manifesting your own destiny. You see, if you win, the victory is twice as sweet. You came, you saw, you obnoxiously talked shit, and you won. But if you lose, no one cares and no one remembers. Who won the silver medal in the 200 meter freestyle event in the 1972 Olympics behind Mark Spitz? Exactly! So why not take the risk? Everyone will be so enamored with the winners that they'll forget all about your stupid remarks. It's a win-win situation.

So stop being dicks to the guys willing to call their shots. For once those cheese eating surrender monkey Frenchies showed some balls. Unfortunately their balls were handed back to them by the Americans, and now we can forget about them for another four years.