When the opening ceremonies kick off for the Olympics, I get excited. It doesn’t matter if it’s the summer or winter version of the games. I simply love the Olympics.

Photo credit: Robert Scales on Flickr

When the closing ceremonies come about, I get a little sad. Two weeks straight of competition seems to have gone by in a blur. It only lasts a few days until you realize that the next games will come about in two years, so it all works out in the end.

Perhaps there was something a little extra to these games in Beijing, but my level of interest has certainly gone up from previous games. I think it’s because of my realization of how incredible the human body can be in particular events.

Photo credit: Robert Scales on Flickr

When you strip it down to a single event, it’s all about who can be better at some of the most elemental, human aspects of competition. Who can run the fasted, throw the furtherest, jump higher, jump longer, life more weight, etc. It gets to be extremely basic, but these people dedicate their lives to one moment that might stretch out to a few more moments that might, and it’s a very slight chance, put them on the stand to win a medal on a global stage.

The team competitions are just as enthralling, and the talent and dedication is hardly lost on those competitions. Still, as a gymnast, you don’t have a team of people to lean on to get yourself at the top of your game. And in those situations, it’s almost worse. One botched attempt and you’ve lost the medal for an entire team event. It’s nerve wracking just watching it, so I can hardly imagine being a competitor.

Photo credit: Kris Krug on Flickr

It’s tough to really put it into words as to how I really feel about the games, but Rebecca might be able to relay something by the way I would pull the remote away from her when attempting to “see what else is on”. This only happens once every four years. The rest of the TV world can wait.

Dan had a great post, so I will cheapen out just slightly and quote a lot of his post here because his passion hits the nail on the head for how I feel.

Another Olympics

I still have a hat from the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. I remember watching Peggy Fleming skate. I remember when to black athletes bowed their heads and raised their gloved fists during the national anthem in Mexico City. I was glued to the set during the tragedy in Munich. I saw the “miracle on ice”.

I saw a basketball dream team do what we had always wanted. We finally sent the best basketball players we had instead of a college all-star team and that team destroyed the competition. I remember a Brazilian basketball team member being asked what he thought about the dream team and he said he thought it was great because it would raise the level of basketball the world over and now the NBA has players from all over the world and it isn’t an easy time for us anymore.

I crushed hard on Dorothy Hamill in 1976. I watched Carl Lewis dominate and then fail when he tried to repeat. I saw Mark Spitz win 7 gold medals. I saw Nadia’s 10 and loved Olga’s smile. I saw the favorites fall and underdogs win.

I love the Olympics but hate all the commercialism. But I understand that they could not survive without the money. I hate the U.S. network’s coverage because I want to see all the winners from all over the planet not just the American winners. I love the Canadian coverage because they are on live and show more. I would LOVE a cable package where you could see coverage from even more countries.

I LOVE it when an athlete or team from a small country wins because those people are then national heroes. [...]

There will be lots of tears during the Olympics for me. I’m just that way. I don’t care who it is, but when they’re on that podium and their national anthem plays I get emotional.

I love the Olympics. [zonaboy]

Here, here.

Photo credit: Kris Krug on Flickr

Beijing really did a number on these games. The venues were impressive, both opening and closing ceremonies were mind blowing, and the head of the IOC is already telling London that the bar has been raised high for 2012.

I enjoyed a lot of what I saw of these games. Let all of the political issues and arguments stem forth from these Olympics, but the spirit of competition sucked me in.

Phelps got eight gold medals, Jamaica is home of the fastest man in the world, and the strongest man of the games has the biggest heart. That’s just so cool.

When we were in Kansas City last week, the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics started. During our time there, every TV we were around seemed to be tuned into the games. Pretty much everyone was talking about the opening ceremonies, and my family nearly dropped everything to find a TV to watch the amazing show they put on to kick off the games.

Photo credit: Kris Krug on Flickr

Quite honestly, I love the Olympics. Winter or summer, I get glued to anything and everything. I think it basically comes down to the competition of the world’s best, and it only happens every four years. I really dig that. Well, maybe not curling just yet (maybe Vancouver 2010 will change that), but the rest of it is pretty cool.

In various hotel rooms and living rooms of my relatives, it was NBC, MSNBC, and USA Network to flip between and feed the need. According to my brother, who is very into digital satellite and HD, he had access to a few more extra channels of continuous Olympics coverage, but that’s extra that you have to pay compared to this standard trio of channels that most cable TV subscribers get.

Being on vacation, I can’t complain about the coverage too much because we were on a trip to see my family and enjoy KCMO. Still, when we could, we caught what we could of the games, whatever events were being shown. Combined with some incredible coverage by our Raincity Studio pals Kris Krug and Robert Scales, renowned new media gurus on the ground in Beijing, we were keeping up just fine and dandy.

Photo credit: Kris Krug on Flickr

Come back to Vancouver, and the scope of coverage changes dramatically on TV. Of course, it’s all CBC back in Canada, but the amount of coverage and the way they do it is significantly better. (Hint: get proxy access and watch their streaming coverage)

On the CBC, you do see more events that you probably wouldn’t see on NBC’s coverage, and a lot of that is due to the precedence that comes from showing as much U.S. athletes as possible. If there is a game of beach volleyball between two countries in an elimination round and one of them isn’t the U.S., you’re probably not going to see it unless it’s for a medal. You’ll get highlights, but you probably didn’t get to watch China take out Austria today like we did on CBC. You might get the highlights though.

Do I care about any of those teams? Not really, but it was a good match, regardless of how bad the Austrians played. Oh man, and it was really bad.

One thing we have access to back in Vancouver is a NBC affiliate in Detroit and Seattle, giving us both east and west coast coverage. Basically, all of the “live” coverage that the east coast gets is mostly prerecorded live and run in prime time. That makes sense because NBC wants to maximize their audience (which mostly means maximize profits so they can jack up the prices to advertisers who run their commercials during those events at the most inconvenient time).

On the other hand, CBC seems to be running as much as they can in real time. East coast runs the desk in Beijing until it’s time for the west coast prime time to kick in. They’re subtle about stuff that is tape delayed, but they hardly call it “live”.

Ron McLean has even been up front about some airing of events being tape delayed. I’m fine with that. There are so many events, there is no way that you can show everything all at once. Even at work I’ve turned on Radio-Canada in the background just so I can see the events. I don’t understand a lick of French, but they run a lot through the day to give me my fix, much of it being repeated over and over until Toronto kicks back in with English.

Duane shared this post with me, and I’m glad that I’m not the only one feeling this. To say that Russell Beattie is somewhat upset with NBC’s coverage is slightly understated, and he goes on to point out numerous reasons that makes a lot of sense to me in hindsight, especially in comparison with the coverage I see on CBC now.

The absolute blind rage I’m experiencing trying to view the Olympics is going to give me a fucking embolism. I was already prepared for the worst from NBC, who have fucked up the last 3 Olympic games coverage, but I honestly couldn’t have imagined how evil and extortionary they have become. [russellbeattie]

I’m not going to say that what NBC has done so far with these games is wrong, right, better, or worse, but once you are able to get away from it, you have to wonder about how much better it could be done.

Since everything is shown in the evening prime time, there is no stopping everything in the middle of your work day to watch some amazing, breath stopping event. There is no cohesion with the world in being in that one, true moment of greatness. This does not represent the “one world” notion that the Olympics is meant to be.

We watched Michael Phelps win his 8th gold medal when it happened. It wasn’t shown on the west coast feed on NBC until four hours later. We saw highlights from the end of the womens marathon on CBC just a few hours after it was over, but we were able to watch the end of it “live” nearly five hours later on NBC.

I’m not sure how you change it, but there is something being lost by the way NBC is conducting their control over how the U.S. gets Olympic coverage. I’m not sure that many Americans even know it.