Yoga as an Olympic Sport?

Apparently if Bikram has his way.

Neal Pollack, Slate, offers a dispatch Top Yogi from the 6th International Yoga Competition. He remarks - "Yoga has done more for my physical and mental well-being than anything else I've tried."

I steeled myself to bear witness to some sort of whacked-out yoga circus, and that's more or less what I got. But a lot of yoga culture feels weird and circuslike to me anyway, so I would have felt disappointed if it had ended up being otherwise.

Well if you're exposure to yoga is Bikram, it is wierd and circuslike and whacked out. It's also not yoga:

At the center of the weekend, wearing flashy suits and various fedoras, stood Bikram Choudhury, the animating force behind the competitive yoga circuit. Here's a man who's copyrighted his style of yoga (26 postures, repeated twice, in a room heated to 105 degrees Fahrenheit), sends cease-and-desist letters to those who dare flout the copyright, and, in interviews, summarily dismisses all other forms of American yoga while also bragging about his love for McDonald's and his large fleet of self-restored Rolls-Royces. He once famously told Business 2.0 magazine that his yoga was the "only yoga." When asked why, he said it was because he has "balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 megatons each. Nobody fucks with me." Not surprisingly, other yoga circles view him and his particular craft with everything from mildly dismissive amusement to a disdain coming close to disgust.

That sums up Mr. Bikram - but that's not why he disgusts me. Rather it's because he is popularizing only one very small part of yoga. Yoga has 8 limbs, or parts; the poses (asanas) are ONE part. One/eighth.

Regardless of the size of his balls, his pea brain can't apprehend. His ego is simply a symptom of his misunderstanding of all of yoga's component parts. If he understood yoga, his humility wouldn't enable him to say in a recent interview said that prop-heavy Iyengar yoga studios look like "a Santa Monica sex shop."

With out any sense of irony, Mary Jarvis, a San Francisco-based yoga-studio owner who was one of Bikram's first U.S. students, states:

"The more advanced a yoga posture is, the more humble the yogi should be," she said. "If somebody's really arrogant, I won't train them. They can have a great posture on stage and be a total asshole."

SO funny!