Silver medalist in the decathlon takes on some more challenges like ping pong and foosball. London pulled off an incredible Olympics with an amazing finale last night.
NBC is getting a ton of heat for not showing many of the premium sporting events in The Olympics live for the American audience. Given what they paid, it’s understandable that they want to maximize prime time viewership, and NBC’s defenders are quick to point out the record rating for these Olympics.
But the NBC strategy was seriously flawed for the 100 meter final featuring the fastest human Usain Bolt. The race took place live at around 4:30 PM EST on Sunday. Since when is a Sunday afternoon a bad time to show a premium sporting event? People all around the country would have made time on a Sunday afternoon to take in this epic final. I understand NBC’s general strategy, but this decision is an epic fail.
This is a cool story that helps put the Olympic Games in perspective. Guor Marial, a refugee from the South Sudan, will be the first athlete to represent his country in London 2012, but he won’t be running under his nation’s flag. He’ll be running as an independent under the Olympics flag.
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Anyone who saw the opening and/or closing ceremonies for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing knows that they were… well… simply amazing. I don’t care what people say about the fireworks being fake, and a ton of other stuff being CGI, it looked great, and was a real treat to watch. The next Summer Olympic Games will be held in London, England in 2012. Yahoo! Sports columnist Martin Rogers wrote a great piece on the high standards that were set by China, and how hard it’ll be for London to match them.
Any attempt by London to replicate the extraordinary exhibition staged by the Chinese capital would ultimately be doomed to abject failure.
The 2008 edition was the kind of Olympics that is only possible if you have the world’s biggest collection of humanity at your obedient disposal.
Few other countries have the kind of political control needed to order factories to temporarily shut down to reduce smog, or forbid half of all car owners from taking to the road on any given day.
It’ll be really interesting to see what London is able to pull off. However, we’re going to have to wait four years to find out.