I'm breaking the theme for this announcement

Serbia and Croatia are currently playing each other in Men's Water Polo.

This means two things:
1. There's a lot of hairy guys in that pool right now.
2. There's a lot of mauling, wrestling, drowning, and otherwise fighting between teams. Seriously. These guys want to hurt each other.


Why is this? Er...I can't really explain the unibrow-chest hair thing (although interesting thought: they may very well be the hairiest people of the Olympics) but the fighting? Croatia and Serbia were at war with one another from 1991 to 1995 regarding independence issues. Pretty much, Croatia wanted to break away from Yugoslavia and Serbia opposed this, so the Serbs living in Croatia were like "Well fuck this, we're attacking you from the inside now." And the war between Serb guerrillas and Croatia raged on for a couple of years.

So...these teams aren't just playing to win, they are playing for national pride and dignity. The announcers are commenting on the fact that tons of the players' countrymen are in the crowd watching the game anxiously because the outcome is very important.

...I don't know what I think about this situation. I really, really, REALLY despise war. And I mean...these men are the same, pretty much. They live in the same chunk of world and they certainly LOOK the same. I mean it; if you switched their helmets around you wouldn't know which was really which. (Heck. Right now I don't know which is which.)

Maybe next they should have the Greeks vs. the Turks.

War sucks...but the results a decade later of enemy countries playing water polo are pretty damn amusing.