The Cruelest Rule on Earth

The Bellend of the Month for August 2016 is the cruelest rule in the Olympics. Here's how it got this distinction: you start running young. Really young, like at the age of 5. You stay after school every day and practice. You get blisters on your feet. By the time you're 10 years old, you've participated in more track meets and your whole room is full of medals and trophies. You ruin more pairs of sneakers than a dog trapped in a foot locker. You're 18 years old and you can jump higher, run faster, and endure more pain than more than 99% of the world's population. Fast forward to now - you're 21, you've qualified for the Olympics, and you've sacrificed thousands of hours of your life - relationships too - to get where you are. Every morning workout, every time you puked, every injury you rehabilitated from, every ice bath, every labored breath has led up to this moment. And as you wait on the starting line, your body primed and trained to jump at the slightest provocation, you bolt for the hurdles as fast as you can. Only to realize there's no one behind you. Only to realize you had a false start. Only to realize that you've been disqualified and your entire life's preparation for this moment was in vain. That's what happened to 21-year-old French hurdler, Wilhem Belocian when he was disqualified for a single false start. The false start disqualification rule is being called out by The Washington Post as the "cruelest rule in the Olympics" and for good reason: it ruins athletes lives. Just look at how utterly crushed Belocian is - he collapsed to the ground and pounded the track in disbelief, and anger, that his Olympic dreams were all over. And the reason why this incredibly strict policy is in place all boils down to ad dollars, unfortunately. The rule was implemented after the Beijing games in order to speed up track meets, which were slowed down by false starts. This caused television broadcasts to run over their scheduled allotted time. You'd think they'd allocate one warning to each competitor, or at the very least one for the entire field, but, these are TV execs you're dealing with after all. After seeing Belocian's heartbreaking reaction, people all over the internet began calling for an end to the unfair rule, and another chance to Belocian.