Going for Gold: Your guide to Olympic drinking

By Jared Vaillancourt [Contributor]

Well, the Olympics have come and most of us are finally ready to initiate several weeks of very forgettable memories.

If you’re like one of the many…  whom am I kidding? If you’re a person, and not some weird reading machine or something, then you plan to drink over the Olympics, probably under the guise of celebration or team spirit.

Come on, my friend. You know damn well that “celebration” is the English word for “Go ahead, you can get plastered and no one will call AA”. The Olympics are special times where alcohol flows like water because we finally can use the excuse that we’re patriotically drowning ourselves.

During the Olympics, it’s all about the beer. Sure, you can toast with the heavy stuff if you’re a stay-at home separatist sociopath, but if you’re patriotic enough to buy tickets to the games or go to the pubs to watch them, then you’ve earned the right to have just enough money for the cheap stuff and precious little else.

However, Olympic drinking is not all fun and games (no pun intended). I’m sure you all know the research, the statistics and the police propaganda (in this case good propaganda), but I know first hand that drinking during the Olympics can be just as devastating as it can be fun. This brings up another fun English word called – wait for it – “moderation”.

Fortunately, I have the kind of friends who like to be lazy and get other people to do things for them when they get hammered. Instead of an overwhelming desire to drive, their motivation for leaving the couch turns to dust and is replaced by an intense curiosity directed towards how loudly they can cheer for their home team. To them, so long as they know they’re not going to drive, “moderation” might as well be Spanish for “who can drink the most”?

I don’t know what you might want to take from this article, but I do have a word of advice: if you’re going to go to the parties and don’t want to wake up feeling like a herd of rhinos just had their way with you, then be sober. As your friends get more and more drunk they won’t notice, and afterwards you’ll see some pretty funny stuff that you will remember (and haunt them with) deep into the medal ceremony.

Trust me; it’s a hell of a lot more fun that hugging that toilet bowl all night long.