Danny ChaiI can’t compare to Wong’s sublime blog, but some Olympics notes.
Abby is easily manipulated. There are many situations where she doesn’t know the appropriate emotional response, so if I start laughing, she then (and only then) starts laughing herself. If it’s situationally inappropriate, she won’t know – she just follows my cues. I’m exactly like this with gymnastics. No clue what’s good and bad; I can only follow Tim Daggett’s cues. And personally, I think he gives bad ones. He just seems surprised at the scores too often, pointing out errors the judges apparently don’t see, and applauding routines the judges are down on. I need a better guide. And does it age me that I remember him from the ’84 Olympics? It’s hard to forget a team that features someone named “Gaylord”.
Tom Hammond really looks like a woman. And many of the women competitors, across many events, look like men. It doesn’t help that in swimming, both genders wear the same types of swimsuits now. It’s confusing.
In general, I’m against sports where competitors wear makeup and/or hair glitter. And ones where there’s too much subjective judging (these things seem to often go together). So not a fan of gymnastics, figure skating, diving, among others. I’d be fine with limiting the Olympics to purely objective sports. A coworker suggested they eliminate anything that doesn’t fit under the official Olympic motto: Faster, Higher, Stronger. I’m not totally down with that, as it would eliminate some interesting events (pretty much any event that uses a ball) and keep some odd ones (high jump, kayak), but I dig the main idea.
I think my favorite moment of the Olympics so far was when Andrea Kramer interviewed the U.S. 4×100 free relay team after (barely) beating France, when she mentions how France said they would crush the U.S. and asked them, “who’s laughing now?” and one of the U.S. guys responded, “We are. (Pause) The United States of America.” That’s it. Come on, Andrea, you can’t expect athletes to answer a question any way but literally. Second favorite moment was when Costas was joint interviewing Phelps and Spitz and he asks Spitz a question comparing how Phelps’ achievement compares against the greatest in history… and Phelps starts answering. Granted, everyone’s been kissing his butt, but that’s kind of an arrogant misunderstanding.
Speaking of which, I’m over the Phelps thing. I enjoyed his accomplishment, he’s the greatest Olympian ever, but even still, I think NBC overdid the coverage.
Wang Zhizhi looks 40 years old.
The live feed stuff on nbcolympics.com is awesome, and really well done. Good video quality, and the text-based play by play and commentary is pretty interesting. It’s really weird not having commentators, though. Like, there’s this clip of a Hungarian weightlifter suffering a horrific elbow injury, and the absence of any sound other than his agonizing shouts of pain makes it especially gruesome. But having the chance to watch some of the non-mainstream sports is pretty cool. Last night I saw a fascinating women’s table tennis doubles bronze medal match between Korea and Japan. Today I saw some men’s handball (Russia vs. South Korea), baseball (Korea vs. Taiwan aka Chinese Taipei), and basketball (China vs. Greece).
Re: the table tennis match, the 4 women were scary looking. One of the Japanese women looked like the scary character from Akira. The game itself was fascinating. For one, they all use the Western grip. I know very little about table tennis so maybe that’s not surprising, but it is for me.
It’s really entertaining though. I like those changes they made a few years back – larger ball, must be visible during the serve, 11 points per game, best of 5 games per match, to get longer rallies and make each point more meaningful. The long rallies are really fun to watch. And I love the commentary on stuff I know nothing about. “The Koreans change up with topspin attacks.” “Sometimes as an attacker you overhit against the backspin ball.” Good stuff.
And it was nice that Korea won. Why is Korea so good at the Olympics, anyway? If you look at this Medal Count Map, Korea’s been way overrepresented in the medal count given its size since 1984. I don’t think of Koreans as being particularly athletic, so it’s odd.