Gotta keep up with the news.
I read a really interesting article that basically attributes to the decline of prominence of the Olympics in American pop culture to the end of the cold war. Basically, it’s no longer a glorious patriot and poltical events pitting two worldviews against each other. The pagentry means a lot when you are representing the American way of life- and you no longer have the patriotism of the USSR and all our stereotypes that go along with that to entertain us. The Olympics used to be Rocky IV.
Our enemies now arn’t people we can meet up with in a ski competition. We no longer have anything to prove in the Olympics.
I also read an interesting article that said the winter Olympics privledges white, rich nations who do rather specialized sports needing a lot of expensive equiptment- only things poeple in the upper classes are going to have experience with or care about. . So it doesn’t hold a lot of interest for large segments of the population.
It’s from Scotland. It is similar to lawn bowling and Bocce; both popular sports in Europe. It’s a little bit like horse shoes as well.
I find it fascinating. There is a lot of strategy and a well placed shot can change everything in an instant. The more you learn about it the more intersting it is. Basically, you get a point for each stone you have that is closest to the “bulleseye” than any of your opponent’s stones.
It’s called curling becuase you can curve the stone by putting spin on it. The brooms let you reduce friction so the stone will go farther and also to decrease the amount of curve. I imagine the original use was to keep the falling snow from interfering with the sliding stone.
This is really where I was trying to go. It’s not so much the Olympics itself that concerns me, it’s the fracturing of society. More and more, we are shrinking into smaller, more specialized audiences. Remember when Johnny Carson put everyone to bed, and you could laugh about his monologue with your friends in the morning? Now, maybe you saw Leno, but odds are most of your co-workers didn’t. I think we’ve lost something. It’s not about Carson, it’s about the shared experience.
A similar thing happens in the libraries. Now, to research an item, one looks it up directly on the computer and gets the information. The search is gone; the thrill of learning something new is gone. As we splinter, we also lose the possibility of new experiences.
The other night, I found a movie on TV that I found very interesting. It came on a channel that, if the channels were a la carte, I probably wouldn’t have chosen. Not the movie changed my life or anything, but I wouldn’t have seen it if the opportunity hadn’t been there.
I tend to agree. I still have a huge problem with almost nothing being shown live, but the coverage of the last couple of Olympics seems to be getting better, less jingoism. Splitting the coverage among several networks definitely helps (especially cable networks that don’t have such huge ratings expectations).
And the U.S. hasn’t had a meltdown. A few of the high profile atheltes have (and the Alpine ski team has mostly stunk), but over all, we’re doing quite well.
BTW, I love watching the curling.
And even though the results may have made headlines, fewer people had access to those headlines. The news gets out much faster & wider now than it did in the '70s.
Kinda what Malodorous said—we need terrorists fielding Olympic teams to make it exciting again! 
(Might be a little too exciting, if you get me. :eek: )
Well, semi-duh, right? I mean, it’s the winter Olympics. Nations that have anything significant in the way of what we usually think of as “winter” do tend to be ethnically white. And messing around with ice and snow and similar harsh conditions that humans would have trouble surviving in unprotected usually does involve some sort of equipment.
That said, I don’t see how skating events, for example, are significantly more “equipment-heavy” than track and field sports. And here in the Netherlands, skating is most definitely not an “upper classes only” activity, even if once again we didn’t have enough cold weather this winter to freeze the canals, rats. 
But in bobsled, all you need is a dream*!
*And $35000 for the sled and access to one of no more than about 20 bobsled runs in the entire world (north of the equator, natch).
Well that is the key. An ice rink is a pretty big damn specialized peice of equiptment, and outside of northern climates thats what you need if you want to ice skate (and, as a former competative roller skater, I can attest that the one-on-once coaching the skating calls for, skates, costumes, and club memberships can add up). Around here skating is probably something the average person does at best once a year. And prices of rink entry and skate rental reflect taht.
But thats not the big deal. The big deal is that there arn’t a lot of ice rinks in Mexico or Brazil or India or Thailand. So a lot of people just arn’t going to be interested. And increasingly Amrericans are more interested in the things that are intersting in Mexico or Brazil or India or Thailand and less interested in whats popular in London and Moscow and Amsterdam. A lot of Americans consider Europe to be basically “just like us” so a comptetition dominated by Europeans isn’t as exciting.
In much of the world, Olympic athletes don’t have access to training facilities that are much beyond what we could find at, say, our local high school. Most Summer Olympic sports are things you could start doing on your own even if you live in a village somewhere and don’t have access to much training or equptment. A good runner is going to find that out, but a lot fo people in Zimbabwe could have the potential to be great ice skaters and would never ever know.
Along that lines, the summer Olympics has the appeal of “Bob used to spend his day running on the African Savannahs…and now he’s in the Olympics” and “Pablo spent his childhood playing soccer in the Barrio- now he’s got sponsers!” or “Fatima lifted weights in prison- now she’s a weightlifting champ”. It’s got this great rags-to-riches human angle and a truely worldwide cast of characters. Americans eat that stuff up. But the winter Olympics has this wierd cold human-machine thing where highly trained athletes who have been coached for years attach themselves to odd equiptment and do strange things that they would never do in real life (unlike running or swimming). It’s less engaging.
I bet the 2008 summer Olypics are going to be a big hit. We’ve got enough rivalry with China and have enough interest in China that we’ll care about this.