If horseracing is the sport of kings, then surely bowling is a … very good sport as well.”

Truer words have never been spoken by fictional athlete and animated gadabout Homer Simposon, but alas, neither horseracing nor bowling are in the Olympics. Instead, we’ll have to make due with gymnastics (also 35 other sports).

Gymnastics gets quite a bit of coverage here in the US, but I have mixed feelings. Certainly the level of athleticism involved is quite high, but the scoring, if not completely subjective, is hardly an exact science. In 2004 for instance, men’s olympic gymnastics was marred by controversy, leading a Canadian judge to evenutally admit he was pressured into boosting Alexei Nemov’s score in the Men’s High Bar Finals, an Olympic outrage to be sure.

Since then, the gymnastics scoring system has gotten a complete overhaul, meaning no more perfect 10’s. Instead a routine’s total score, which is usually between 15 and 17, is the sum of an “A score” and a “B score”. The A score is calculated in advance from a routine’s 10 most difficult elements, plus bonuses for transitions between these elements (except in the case of the vault, where the score just comes from the whole twisty-flippy-vault-move). The B score is calculated during a routine’s execution by having judges subtract the deductions they witness from a start value of 10.

Some folks (confused gymnastic types mostly) feel the new system is flawed, as it seemingly encourages the pursuit of technical difficulty over flawless artistry. Certainly the system itself embodies this principal. In the long term, I’m most definitely convinced of the new system’s potential, but in 2008, since there’s very little precedent, scoring still feels a tad clunky.

Cumbersome evaluations aside, if you watched the Men’s Gymnastics Team Finals live Monday, you likely came away satisfied. The US Team, coping with the loss of both Hamm brothers due to injury, was more than happy to take home the Bronze. China, meanwhile, asserted it’s newly found herculean dominance by besting second place Japan by over 7 points (which seems like a large margin of victory).

One highlight from China’s perfomrance was Chen Yibing’s performance on the rings, which you can actually watch, or in my case rewatch, here on nbcolympics.com (skip to about 19 minutes in). You may need to download Microsoft Silverlight first, but trust me, it’s worth it, because NBC has put up a whole boat load of video along with a number of events you can watch live.
In the live streams there are no pesky announcers, so it’s perfect for watching multiple events at once. As I’m writing this, for example, I’m able to keep an eye on the Women’s 50m Air Rifle Final while at the same time watching the Men’s Gymnastic’s All-Around on NBC. Go ‘lympics!!!

Anyway, the Women’s Team Final on Tuesday proved slightly less satisfying. Unlike the US Men, the US Women were hoping to best China and take first, and I was pretty jazzed about whole thing because the team captain Alicia Sacramone currently attends Brown University. Unfortunately, Alicia was a little off her game, and the US had to settle for silver (although they probably wouldn’t have won even if Alicia hadn’t fallen). Also, the victorious Chinese “women” looked a tad young, and there appears to be good reason to be suspicious. Even famed gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi, Bob Costas’ cohost during the event, couldn’t resist calling their age into question at the very end of NBC’s broadcast.

Whether they are 16 or not, it hardly changes the disturbing fact that world’s greatest women’s gymnastics team has an average height of 4′-9”, and an average weight of 77 lbs. The more shapely US team, in contrast, towers over them at an average height just over 5′ and an average weight of 107 lbs. Rather than rely on difficult to verify age restrictions, I encourage the International Gymnastics Federation to consider mixing things up yet again and bringing tug of war back to the Summer Olypmics.

And finally we conclude with the real motivation for this post: what the hell is up with the women’s floor routine? First off, it’s set to (often questionable) music, clearly a misstep for any event wishing to be considered a sport. Second, almost all of the routines consist of a series of very impressive flips, tragically interspersed with awkward limb flailing. The flips are certainly Olympic-worthy, but if you’re going mix in the other stuff, and set it to music, why not just bite the bullet and do some actual dancing? I realize competitors are probably demonstrating their ability to execute some sort of required gymnasticy movements, but said movements don’t appear any more physically challenging than say, ballet, and they sure as hell look worse. As near as I can tell the routines would be a heck of a lot better if a choreographer were involved. My only guess as to why they aren’t doing this already is that maybe it’s too hard to dance well when you’re also worrying about having to do all those crazy flips. I’ll have to look into it.

Bonus Fact: Bowling was featured in the 1988 olympics as a demonstration sport.

• Swimming: In terms of raw Olympic excitement, swimming has so far been the highlight. Thanks to the introduction of the Speedo’s LZR swimsuit (as well as Beijing’s top notch pool), world records are being broken in spades. In last night’s 4 x 100 men’s freestyle relay, for instance, the top 5 teams all broke the previous world record. Even better, the US team, which completely smashed the world record by nearly 4 seconds, pulled out a dramatic come-from-behind victory by overtaking France in the final split second (apparently France had been quite confident about it’s chance at victory), and in so doing kept alive hopes of Michael Phelps winning a record 8 gold medals. What’s more, this dramatic race was broadcast live at 11:30 last night, a rarity given the 12 hour time difference (related fact: China, which is as long as the US, uses only one timezone).
• Volleyball: NBC has been broadcasting quite a bit of volleyball, an excellent sport which is having its most exciting century ever thanks to its switch to “rally scoring” in 2000 (meaning a team no longer has to be serving to score). One problem with volleyball is that anytime you get a chance to play it, it’s usually with a sizable chunk of people who don’t know how to hit a volleyball (it’s “bump, set, spike” folks, come on), but at the olympic level they don’t seem to have that problem.

  Also, since 1996 the Olympics have featured beach volleyball, which is definitely one of the “cool” summer olympic sports. It’s set on a beach, the player’s outfits keep things casual, and there are, apparently, cheerleaders in bikinis. Beach volleyball is also genuinely exciting to watch (much more diving than most terrestrial sports), and this weekend it just so happened to feature a stunning upset in which the US team (reigning world champions) lost to Latvia (the 23rd seed out of 24 teams). Fear not, though, our boys on the beach have since trounced Switzerland in straight-set blowout.

• Badminton: Like volleyball, badminton involves a net, but the similarities stop there. For one, badminton is one of the few summer sports in which the US has never one a medal (the other two are table tennis and team handball). Sadly, based on the events of this weekend (and today), it doesn’t look like that’s about to change. Part of the problem, I think, is that many American’s view badminton as tantamount to croquet, or possibly horseshoes, in terms of it’s potential athletic prowess. In contrast, many Asian nations take the sport quite seriously, which why China has gone out of its way to construct one of the finest badminton venues ever built. As NBC’s announcers have been quick to point out, the gym, located at the Beijing University of Technology, has been specially built to keep airflow below 0.5 mph, but at the same time maintain a cool temperature. To accomplish this, over 9000 vents are located under the spectators’ seats. Badminton (and perhaps table tennis?), may be a tad delicate for America’s tastes.

  Additional Badminton Fact: In badminton you hit a shuttlecock, which according to the internet consists of a piece of cork embedded with 16 overlapping feathers from the left wing of a goose.

• Equestrian: I don’t actually know anything about equestrian events, but I was watching dressage for like 15 minutes at some point, and there were a couple of observations I wanted to put out there. 1) The apparel for this event seems oddly formal for a summer sport (it’s kind of the anti-beach volleyball). 2) There is a 67 year old competing. In contrast, swim fans get all excited when a 41 year old competes, and in women’s gymnastics, 31 is ancient. 3) Equestrian sports are the only sports in which Men and Women compete against each other. 4) Horses have passports, and from what I can gather, they appear to be a good deal larger than human passports.

Update: Croquet, it turns out, was an event in the first Olympics, along with some other odd choices.

If you’re also part of the relatively small group of people that watch Summer Olympics, you probably noticed that they started yesterday. I noticed that too, and consequently I have little intention of leaving my house for the next 2 weeks (15 days actually).

As I noted one year ago, NBC anticipates generating 3600 hours of footage, which if recorded (and I think it’s safe to assume NBC is recording it) should last until 2010 olympics, provided you limit your daily olympic intake to 6 hours a day. As for me, I plan to watch it all in the next two weeks (step 1: rent 8 more TVs), then give y’all a heads regarding what to look out for.

With so many world class competitions taking place in parallel, there’s already plenty to blog about. I could, for instance, recount the Chinese weightlifter, and now gold medalist, Chen Xiexia’s (olympic) record-breaking clean-and-jerk, which I just witnessed. I could muse over Przemyslaw Wacha of Poland’s victory over Estonia’s Raul Must in olympic badminton (which I also just witnessed). I could hype up the US women’s sweep in saber fencing (don’t worry, you haven’t missed that one, it’ll be broadcast later today). Or I could just provide a helpful primer on team handball, which is getting a surprising amount of coverage here on day 1 (It’s like soccer, only miniaturized, indoors, and you can use your hands… AWESOME!).

Needless to say, they’ll be time for all that later though (especially that last one). For now, I’m just going to start things off with a clean slate and give a quick rundown of recent events which a more diligent person would have blogged about.

• As I already mention, I went to Canada. Since then I returned home. Toronto was lovely, but people there are absurdly inclined to obey don’t walk signs even when no traffic is coming. Jessica tells me she noticed a lot of that in Munich as well, but that’s neither here nor there.

  Also, in Canada, they spell center “centre”. I’m more of an “er” man myself (get it, because of my name! and my initials!), but I’d be willing to meet them half way and do away with the second “e” all together. Finally, while in Toronto, I had a hell of a meal at Colborne Lane. Our favorite dish was definitely the miso glazed cod, but the ice cream prepared table side via liquid nitrogen was also a highlight.

• I finally got an iPhone. It’s a fine piece of electronics, but buying it was a saga. For some silly reason Jessica and I decided to buy one the saturday after new version came out. The line at Apple’s 14th store didn’t actually seem that long, but since phones had to be activated in store, each Apple employee was basically only selling like 2 or 3 phones an hour.

  We had fun talking to the people standing next to us in line, and Apple did provide water and umbrellas (for the sun), but in the end it took us 4 hours to discover that, SURPRISE, Jessica could only update her pre-Cingular phone plan at an AT&T store. We would have had no problem waiting a week to get the phone, but trust me, if you wait online for something for 4 hours, and then fail to acquire said item, you’ll be emotionally distraught. As much as I love Apple, they did not handle this situation well. Certainly they could have at least given us a free t-shirt or something.
  

• I went to Florida! Jessica’s family is always a blast, but since I gave a comprehensive rundown of last year’s Flordia vacation, and this year’s trip followed a similar trajectory, there’s no need to go into that level of detail. I note, however, that my attempt to follow up last year’s Wii purchase with the acquisition of Wii Fit along was tragically thwarted by it’s lack of availability. Apparently buying it at the Nintendo World Store requires lining up before the store opens, and I’ve had quite enough of that sort of thing.
• On Columbia University’s campus, I saw a dude coax a pigeon onto his foot with some bread crumbs. It was a striking followup to June’s cat-on-hat spotting. I’ll admit, it wasn’t as remarkable as seeing someone walking down the street with a cat on their head, but it was certainly odd. You rarely see folks handling pigeons in NYC, since most folks, it seems, see them as somewhere between diseased squirrel and flying rat on the animal likability scale.

During my lifetime, olympic coverage has come a long way. Although I did not pay much attention to the 1984 olympics (I was only 3), I imagine they were available on a single black and white channel with no sound. By 1992, however, NBC had introduced the triplecast, allowing viewers to watch live events on 3 separate pay-per-view channels for the low low price of $170 dollars. Needless to say the network lost millions.

In the coming decade, however, cable olympic coverage blossomed. By the 2006 Winter Olympics a super fan like myself could comfortably watch the olympics on 5 separate cable channels at no extra charge (NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, USA and Telemundo). In 2008 I’m happy to report that NBC is kicking things up a notch. The network is currently planning 3,600 hours of coverage, most of it online. By recording the coverage, and limiting myself to a modest 10 hours of Olympic viewing per day, I will have enough olympics to last one whole year! I will then take the following year off, and begin anew in 2010.

Update (8/8): As of today the Olympics are one year away. I hadn’t realized the Beijing 2008 Olympics started on 8/8/08, but it certainly makes sense. Tonight at 7:30 NBC is airing a half-hour program called “Olympic Zone”. I wonder if that counts as part of the 3,600 hours.