November 9, 2007


Waterboarding To Feature In 2012 London Olympics

Waterboarding1.jpg
Artist’s rendering of the U.S. Olympic waterboarding team in training.

London, UK — U.S. Olympic Commission Director Bob Famous announced Friday that waterboarding has been added to the 2012 Summer Games, which are scheduled to be held in London, England. Weather permitting, events will take place on or near the River Thames; expected categories include team, relay, and freestyle waterboarding. All scoring will be based on well-established “sudden death” criteria.

“We believe that waterboarding has earned its place alongside surfing, windsurfing, waterskiing, and water-balloon fighting, as a viable and relevant Olympic aquatic sport,” said Mr. Famous. “When I see those young American men and women fresh out of college or military academies or whatever, all excited and ready to meet the competition, it makes me feel a lot of something very similar to pride, I can tell you that.”


In Beijing, Chinese Olympic waterboarding team captain and seven-time national champion Xiao Yin Zhang responded to the news with characteristic vigor.

“Tell those weak and puny Americans to bring their best game,” said Xiao. “The People’s Republic will give the United States a waterboarding lesson, you bet. My country has been waterboarding since long before the Pilgrims landed in California.”

“I will admit,” added the feisty Chinese athlete, “those Pilgrims would have been formidable foes. That Salem team was fanatical.”

Smaller nations like Switzerland, Lithuania, and Paraguay—typically lacking histories of unusual or innovative watersports—protested the inclusion of waterboarding, and insisted in high, squeaky voices that faddish “extreme sports” had no place in Olympic competition’s modern era.

“I don’t know what they’re so upset about, but there are ways of finding out,” U.S. Director Famous retorted.

posted by Michael Grant Smith in comedy, crime, government, history, humor, news, politics, satire, sports 

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One Response to “Waterboarding To Feature In 2012 London Olympics”

  1. Sheila Ryan on November 9th, 2007 at 4:26 pm

    It’s a tradition.

    [General Frederick] Funston’s example has bred many imitators, and many ghastly additions to our history: the torturing of Filipinos by the awful ‘water-cure,’ for instance, to make them confess — what? Truth? Or lies? How can one know which it is they are telling? For under unendurable pain a man confesses anything that is required of him, true or false, and his evidence is worthless. Yet upon such evidence American officers have actually — but you know about those atrocities which the War Office has been hiding a year or two . . . .

    Mark Twain, quoted by William Loren Katz in U.S. Water Boarding, 1899 Style