The Games Of The XXIX Olympiad

Thought I would share my impressions of watching the Olympics in the host country...

TV Coverage: It's simply outstanding. Having a state run television network has proven to be a great way to broadcast coverage of the games. The TV network (CCTV) has 3 stations dedicated to Olympic coverage morning to night. As you can imagine, they are primarily focused on the Chinese (I've seen quite a bit of badminton), but they also make an effort to show popular things like Team USA basketball.

When the TV is state run, there are the obvious downsides (see: free speech, Tibet, 13 year old gymnasts) - but one of the upsides is there is no need to generate ad revenue... there are next to no commercials on CCTV when you are watching the games. It's such a nice respite from the US where I imagine it's 2 minutes of commercial for every 10 of coverage... and you have political ads to deal with as well!

There are also none of the sappy human interest stories that NBC seems to show as many hours of as they do actual sports... I know those must be popular, and I know some of these athletes have amazing stories - but let's see the games, people! Well in China, you get the games... even if I don't understand the commentary... and sometimes the rules (see: Judo).

Of course there is no way for a non-Chinese speaker or reader to have any idea what they are showing when, there's no Comcast 'guide' feature... in fact some friends and I showed up at a bar to watch some women's football (US vs. New Zealand) to find out it wasn't being televised... but the 78Kg Men's weightlifting was very popular!

I watched the most amazing 5 set comeback in women's volleyball the other night. Cuba was down 2 sets to love against the host team China. The 3rd game they won 34-32 (games are to 25, win by 2). Then they won the 4th and 5th sets fairly closely!

At work today, they set up a TV hooked to a Classmate PC (Intel product) and using a TV tuner card were able to show the Women's (not sure why we call it 'women's' since all these athletes are really 'girls') Gymnastics All Around Final. It was being broadcast by the Chinese government over some special system they built just for the Olympics so people without digital TV (read: cable/satellite) could watch.

I looked around at one point and it was me and 27 Chinese people, all speaking Chinese, watching a broadcast in Chinese, and them all rooting for the Chinese... you can imagine who I was rooting for! It was a good afternoon to be an American as we took Gold and Silver to the Chinese Bronze! I jumped up on the ping pong table, started dancing around and yelling 'take that, how ya' like me now?'!!! OK, I didn't... and I didn't even think about it, but I wonder how many of you think I am just competitive enough to have done it? :)

Many people have asked us if we are going to the Olympics 'in Beijing' when we are here... We are in fact going to the Olympics, but not in Beijing. As it turns out many of the football (soccer) matches are being played in Shanghai. We had friends (our 'facebook friends') - Eric and Caroline - offer tickets to their friends, as they could not use them. We picked up their quarterfinals tickets - Argentina vs. Netherlands.

I asked my friend Darin (who explained a system to his wife so she knows who to root for in college athletics when she seemingly has no allegiance) who I should root for. I asked if I should root for Netherlands - a northern hemisphere thing, or Argentina - an 'our continents are closest' thing. He responded simply 'You root for Argentina, because they are going to win.' DONE - Argentina it is!

I'll post about how going to my first Olympics was sometime this weekend, or early next week.

Go Argentina!