horses, horses, comin' in in all directions. . . .

OK, hang on a minute. . . . Reining? Reining??? Yeah, that’s its official name. Some folks call it “cowboy dressage.” Whatever. I just saw this piece on the news, and, apparently, we’re all about to call it an Olympic sport. Folks dressed up in cowboy boots and chaps making their horses spin in circles and walk backward. I dunno, sounds like an event more suited to three rings than five, but again, whatever. . . .

Honestly, I think just about everything should be an Olympic sport if it gives somebody joy and you can come up with an intelligent way to separate the winners from the losers (oops, that nixes figure skating), but the talk of making reining an Olympic sport comes just months after the IOC decided to eliminate baseball and softball from the summer games, starting in 2012.

Baseball and softball—great, competitive, team sports, with a large pool of talented amateur athletes in North and South America, the Caribbean, the Pacific Rim, and Australia—or. . . reining. . . with. . . cowboys. . . in boots and chaps. . . and cowboy hats. . . and horses, I guess. Now, I know I can blame George W. Bush for the demise of baseball and softball (I’m not kidding—don’t buy the official spin that it was about steroids and not letting the pros play—there was talk at the time that members of the IOC were just sticking it to the US for its go-it-alone foreign policy, you know, like Iraq, and Kyoto. . .), but how do I explain the ascension of. . . reining?

Is Brokeback Mountain really that popular?