Are you interested in the upcoming Olympics?

The Game Room
1

Me, I’m not a big fan of most sports, and not a fan of how the Olympics is covered, but I was somewhat surprised to not see an active ongoing thread about the Olympics with them coming up so soon. Did an all forum search of “Olympics” and didn’t turn anything up.

So, do any Dopers care? Looking forward to any events in particular? Are the Russian/Zika/infrastructure stories going to overshadow the sport?

I’ll probably tape it and zip through it more evenings than not to see if anything catches my interest, but not planning on making a point of following anything in particular.
-Couldn’t pay me to watch an opening/closing ceremony, tho my wife will likely watch.
-My preference would be to watch the less frequently shown events. Unfortunately, I expect hours and hours will be spent on sand volleyball, golf, gymnastics, etc.
-And I personally have far less interest in the “human nature” stories than they spend.
-Finally, I always find the “USA” chant boorish.

2

The Olympics jumped the shark with Sochi, and is flushing itself away down in Rio.

Thanks to the internet, it is possible for world championships in any number of sports to be viewed, without all the nonsense of the Olympics that puts athletes into the back seat.

3

There’s an Olympics upcoming? Damn, I thought that would be on the news. I’ll bet it’s in some nice place too, not some disease infested rat hole with no clean water and unfinished living quarters.

4

I’m always eager to watch the Olympics, I try to see as much as possible. I spent lots of money to see as many events as I could when they were in Los Angeles, and I went to the Pan American Games in Indianapolis.

5

I thought it was interesting that the entire country of Russia is banned due to their state-sponsored doping program. Of course, they are still considering individual Russian athletes on a case-by-case basis and allowing them to compete under a “neutral” flag and just not earn any medals for Mother Russia. And a headline I saw recently suggests some of the (literal) dopers may still slip through the cracks.

So I think those types of controversies are interesting (as well as all the stuff about Rio being a shithole with dead bodies washing up everywhere etc.), but I’m not actually interested in the games themselves.

6

Only the entire Russian track and field/athletics team has been banned. There was an attempt to ban the entire Russian team, but the IOC chickened out and left it up to the individual sports as to how they want to deal with it.

7

I’ve said before (and will probably say again) that the move from all of the Olympics every four years to one set (winter or summer) every two years removed much of the spectacle from the whole thing. Now it’s just something that comes up every other year.

And, yes, the fact that everything everywhere is available on the Internet 24x7 may also have something to do with the diminished luster of the Rings.

And the fact that the IOC’s corruption makes FIFA look pristine may be a factor as well.

So, Olympics? Meh.

8

Sure, I’ll watch the Olympics. I like women’s diving and gymnastics, as well as basketball and handball.

9

I’ve come to hate the Olympics - that two-week period when absolutely everyone, including complete couch potatoes, become wise and verbose experts on esoteric details of professional competition.

It does amuse me that the universal event, other than on the fields, is every athlete fucking every other athlete nonstop. Who needs medals, y’know? :smiley:

10

I am interested in the Olympics - especially the events that aren’t particularly popular in the USA, so they’re hard to find on TV (if at all). Who’s up for the 10km open water swimming “marathon”?

My two “guilty pleasures” are the swimming 50m races with countries that don’t have swimming pools - oh, wait, that was an episode of The Simpsons…seriously, the swimming 50m and track 100m races open to athletes that didn’t meet the qualifying standards but get in because every country is allowed one male and one female athlete in track & field and swimming. You get some interesting stories in those races, and, to be fair, every one of those runners can run 100m faster than I ever could.

And now there’s a story going around that NBC (which supposedly talked the Korean government into introducing Daylight Saving Time in 1988 so it could show events in prime time without them having to start at 10 AM local time) asked the organizers if the parade of nations could be in English order instead of Portugese, as NBC is under the impression that a significant number of people turn the opening ceremonies off after USA enters, so it wants the country to enter as late as possible. I say, if this is true, then the organizers should move all USA men’s basketball, women’s soccer, and beach volleyball matches to early mornings unless the USA flag bearer dips the flag as it passes by whatever Brazilian government leader is there to open the games officially.

11

I’m always interested in the Olympics, winter more than summer, but I find the summer games pretty interesting too. Swimming, track and field, triathlon, biking, diving, rowing - they all remain interesting to me.

12

I really wasn’t that interested this year. However, I saw some of the women’s diving trials a few weeks ago and now I want to see more of the incredibly talented Kassidy Cook. I hear that she dives well, too. :slight_smile:

13

Last time I seriously watched was the '84 LA games. I don’t like NBC’s coverage, so I just read about whatever was important enough to make regular news headlines. There’s nothing I need to see happen live.

14

I love the Olympics a couple of years back I had a job that let me come home for 2 hours every day during lunch and I loved catching the non prime time shows. Now we’ve cut the cord and if all we get are the prime time coverages I probably won’t watch much but if I can figure out how to stream it I’ll hopefully watch 80+ hours of coverage

15

Train-wrecks are always fascinating.
This Olympics promises to be a doozy.

16

I actually caught part of the 10K open swim in 2012. They were cutting back and forth between another event and that, which was a boat trailing several dozen swimmers in a lake. At one point, they held out water bottles on poles with their country’s flag on it. Never occurred to me that swimmers would need to hydrate, until they said that the one they would have projected to win a gold medal died a year or two before from HYPERthermia, because he was swimming in warm water and couldn’t cool himself off.

I’ll Tivo the opening ceremonies because I think it will be cool to see the countries march in in (most likely) Portuguese alphabetical order.

17

There’s no shortage of problems with the Olympics, as we all know. Corruption, cost overruns, political shenanigans, doping, biased coverage. But fundamentally I think there’s something really quite cool about them.

–The coming together of athletes from all over the world, which is kind of a cliche by now, but it’s really the case: with a few notable exceptions, countries and peoples that can barely stand each other nevertheless come to the event and compete on the same stage. I find inspiration in that.

–In most sports, these are the world’s absolute best athletes. In the course of a couple of weeks, you can see the world’s best hurdlers, the word’s best backstrokers, the world’s best rowers, the world’s best gymnasts, the world’s best cyclists, and on and on and on, all at the peak of their training, all at the peak of their game. There’s no other athletic event that’s remotely comparable.

–I have the same reaction as many others to the force-feeding of storylines by the media (and sometimes by the Olympic committees), but most Olympics wind up with storylines that are unexpected and often quite cool; the whole thing isn’t and can’t be orchestrated from a room in the network studios. It’s fun to watch the making of a new and unexpected star, or to anticipate an especially tough match between two supremely gifted athletes or teams, even or especially when it’s a sport I would seldom if ever watch apart from the Olympics.

So, yeah, I’ll watch and follow the competitions as much as I can. Of course I have work and family responsibilities as well, and I’d rather paddle my kayak than watch other people paddle theirs, so exactly how much I’ll be able to pay attention remains to be seen. But except for a few sports that I really have no interest in watching (hello, boxing, equestrian, and golf), I do enjoy the whole deal, warts and all.

18

Several times, I’ve had people ask me why beach volleyball is so popular. My response? “Have you seen what they wear, or rather, what they DON’T wear?”

:stuck_out_tongue:

19

In the case of Rio, it’s literally flushing itself away.

20

No