Brief observations on the Olympics

[kenjari]

Gymnastics must be one of the hardest things to do, athletically speaking. Even the top gymnasts in the world fall down occasionally, despite the thousands of hours of practice and the high levels of concentration involved. And is it my imagination, or are the commentators for women's gymnastics hypercritical and overly inclined to dwell on the mistakes?

Michael Phelps is ridiculously fast, and so were the rest of last night's men's relay team. I find Phelps very likable, too. He's confident without being arrogant.

I was really disappointed that the first evening of prime-time coverage didn't show more replays of the USA women's saber team. They won all three medals for their event, and those were the first medals the US picked up. You'd think they'd have gotten more air time. Plus, to add to my annoyancce, Costas' co-commentator remark regarding the fencers was "Those girls did just fine". No, those women did something pretty damn cool.

Comments

[cerridwynn.livejournal.com]

So far i like Costas but one of his co-commentators drives me insane and makes me throw things at the tv (soft things). I don't know if she's the one who made that "girls" remark (woman with a low voice?) but it sounds like something she'd say. Ah well.

[kenjari.livejournal.com]

Nope, the co-commentator in question was a man, an ex-player of one of some team sport, but I can't remember which one. I haven't heard the woman yet Although I may have seen her - we were multi-tasking last night by watchiing the olympics with the sound off so that we could listen to the Sox game on the radio, too.
I do like the chats with Bela Karolyi, though. I'm a sucker for nice slavic accents, he has no patience with commentators being dense, and he says whatever the hell he wants (including stating that the current gymnastics scoring system may be opening the door for bias).

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

They showed some women's saber last night? Damn! I would have liked to see that. Dragonfeesh was teammates with one of them at Yale....

[cerridwynn.livejournal.com]

Hee! Yes, Bela Karolyi is awesome. Watching him go on about how the Chinese girls (and in this case he means girls) are all under 16 was hysterical.

[aquafolius.livejournal.com]

I think after a single repeat, he'd made his point. Constantly repeating his issue made him look like a belligerent fool. He'd been in gymnastics for decades, I wanted to hear more from him on form, and less of his whining on something he himself used to practice (before they attempted to instill age minimums).

I enjoyed the comment I saw that conjectured that Bela and his wife weren't upset that the Chinese could be using underage girls with falsified documents, they were upset because the US wouldn't do the same.

[outlawradio.livejournal.com]

I love Bela. I hate the gymnastics commentators.

Elfi: "Ooooooh." (fliches)
Tim: "Thatfall. Will be DEVASTATING."
Al: "Total disaster."

etc.

Perspective?