The Olympics have been incredibly entertaining this year. I didn't pay a great deal of attention to the 2000 Sydney and 2004 Athens games, but I've been glued to the set this time around. Originally I planned to just subscribe to the NBColympics.com 'favorite videos' RSS feed but two things ruined that plan: a) the competition was too good to wait and b) it requires a Windows machine or an Intel Mac.
So that has been the only technical travesty of these games. Microsoft will find some way to screw you once again. Apparently they paid for the rights to provide the online video, so used it to push their latest .NET platform instead of the well-established industry standards in cross-platform online video (e.g. Flash/H.264 like YouTube). I can put up with waiting for primetime broadcasts and have mostly managed to avoid seeing headlines that spoiled the action.
Phelps is certainly the greatest Olympian of all time. But don't forget 32-year-old Jason Lezak, whose clutch relay swims won two of those golds. The moment of the Games was when he beat the French dude Bernard, who smugly figured his team had, as promised, "smashed" the Americans.
Another great moment was when Constantina Tomescu, the Romanian, pulled ahead in the middle of the woman's marathon, building an unchallenged lead and cruising alone to the finish. She's a 38-year-old mom! And of course, following the theme of "middle-aged" world-class athletes, there was swimmer Dara Torres at 41 picking up several medals.
I tuned out a lot of the gymnastics except for the team finals, Shawn John doing incredible leaps but Moscow-born Nastia Luikin having better finishes. The age of the Chinese gymnasts appears to be finally getting some IOC investigation, but I doubt anything will come of it.
Bikini, er sorry, Beach, volleyball has been nice. 8:-) No doubt Xue Chen has inspired a billion Google Image searches. The U.S.-China final in the rain was definitely worth staying up late to see.
I missed tennis, but there were some shocking upsets. I also unfortunately missed the final of woman's pole vaulting, but apparently it was not the competition it could have been, with the Russian Yelena setting a world record and American Jenn Stucynski not coming close.
Our loss in softball is just unfathomable. Indoor volleyball has been great too, especially the woman's, with Logan Tom and (UofA alumna) Stephanie Glass dominating. A few of the distance runners train in Tucson, but their performance has been very disappointing, perhaps the humidity has been an issue.
What else? Usain Bolt's amazing sprints? Stephanie Brown Trafton's gold-winning discus throw? There's more to come! Will the U.S. be able to catch up in the gold medal count?
