The next Olympic gold-medal hurdler could be a poker player

I'm an idea man. I'm full of it, er, them.

Like right now I've got this great idea for how to assure the United States Olympic dominance in every track and field event that involves sprinting, hurdles, and the steeplechase: We recruit poker players.

You see, when a poker player is away from the table temporarily, on a restroom break or dinner break or whatever, and is just heading back to continue playing, it suddenly becomes a matter of life and death to get to the table in time for the next hand. If from a distance he sees the dealer pulling the deck from the Shufflemaster, he will break into a sweat and a sprint, and cover the remaining distance to the table in a dead run.

Mind you, this isn't just the young, healthy kids we're talking about here. This includes the old, the fat, the lame, guys who haven't voluntarily exercised since the Truman administration, and those who are coming back from a cigarette break with their oxygen tanks dragging behind.

I mention the steeplechase and hurdles because that's the other amazing thing about witnessing this surge of adrenaline. These guys can leap tall buildings in a single bound. They can jump over chairs, tables, and the half-walls that surround many poker rooms. Remember the Seinfeld episode in which George Costanza is at a children's party when fire breaks out, and he pushes all the kids down in his mad rush for the door? You see the same thing with poker players desperate to get back to the table. They're absolutely ruthless in their blind dash.

This phenomenon is really only remarkable for those who are stuck. Winning players are a lot more casual about returning. But have a guy lose his first four or five buy-ins, and you've got an Olympic athlete on your hands.

I realize that this is completely insane behavior. Think about it this way: Suppose you need to catch a bus. If it's the last bus of the night, and your destination is an impossible distance away and you've just got to get there, and there's no train or taxi, and you get to the bus stop just as that last bus is pulling away, you well might run for your life and scream for it to stop and throw rocks at it to get the driver's attention, etc. But suppose you knew that, rather than being the last bus of the night, this was a route on which another bus came along every two minutes, rain or shine, day or night. Wouldn't you be inclined to look at the departing bus with a shrug and say, "Oh well. The next one will be here soon"? Of course you would. Because that's what a rational human being would do.

But a poker player who is stuck for a large amount of money loses the ability to reason in such a calm and detached manner. To him, the cards the dealer is putting out right this instant are all that matter. He just knows that they are the pocket aces that will win him the huge pot that turns the session around. Of course, it's just as likely that it will be the pocket kings that lose everything to somebody else's pocket aces, but that possibility does not occur to the stuck player. All he knows is that, by all that is holy, he needs to play this hand, and Lord help anybody or anything that stands in his way.

So here's my idea. Put old, fat, butt-smoking, arthritic poker players in the U.S. Olympic team. When they line up to start the race, all the other competitors will laugh and relax, thinking they've got it cinched. But we have a secret weapon. You see, just before the race, our degenerate gamblers will have been playing poker, in a game that they don't know is rigged, so they're doomed to lose. They'll be down $1000, $2000 just when they get the call to report for the race. Then we fit them with one of those virtual-reality headset things. It will project in front of their eyes an image of the poker game they just left, with the dealer just about ready to begin the next hand.

Bang! The starter pistol goes off, our pokeristas are running like Secretariat, and we nail gold, silver, and bronze, while the muscular, tanned, elite athletes of every backwater third-world banana republic on the planet are left in the dust.

We can't lose.