Olympics Recap

The Olympics and my borderline obsession with the Olympics will soon be coming to a close. It's a good thing the Olympics only happen every 2 years because I really haven't done too much other than watch Olympics for the past 2 weeks. With the closing ceremonies scheduled for tomorrow night (or will they be tonight in China?) I figured it's time for my own little recap of the games.

Pros:

1. The opening ceremony. Justin and I went to our Adam & Erin's house to watch the opening ceremony with friends. Justin had the idea to make the olympic flag out of cottage cheese and dyed pineapple rings for the party. China did an awesome job of putting on a show. It was beautiful, interesting and not too over the top. My favorite part was probably the 2008 drummers in the beginning - that was cool.
2. Michael Phelps. A record 8 gold medals and 7 world records - that kid can swim! The 100M butterfly had me worried, though, winning by 0.01 seconds - crazy!
3. The 4x100M freestyle relay where Jason Lezak came back from being at least half a body length behind to win it. This was probably the most exciting moment of the entire Olympics.
4. Nastia Liuken winning gold in the gymnastics all-around. She is absolutely beautiful to watch too. I love how elegant she is.
5. Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh winning gold for the second Olympics in a row in beach volleyball.
6. DVR. I was able to watch all the broadcasts on NBC which means I got to see more sports and I could fast forward through commercials and other random non-sport stuff although I tended to watch the primetime broadcast in real time.

Cons:

1. Too many commercials, too much commentary, not enough sports! I'd also like to see a greater variety of sports - not just swimming and gymnastics. I don't care if the USA is bad at a certain sport or if it isn't popular enough here to show it - I still want to see it.
2. The new gymnastics scoring system. I was disappointed, but dealt with not having the perfect 10; the thing that really bugged me was that they changed the system so that there wouldn't be any discrepancies like in Athens but Beijing was not without its controversies: Nastia should have been able to at least share the gold for the uneven bars and Alicia Sacramone was completely robbed of a bronze medal for vault.
3. Michael Phelps. Yes he's awesome, yes he won lots of gold medals and broke Mark Spitz' record, that doesn't mean I want to hear about him all the time especially when someone else is swimming a race.
4. Cheating. As far as I know right now this is mainly aimed at China. They had a girl lip sync during the opening ceremonies just because she was cuter than the girl who was actually singing, and they may have some gymnasts who are under 16 years old. I'm not saying that those gymnasts don't deserve to be there - they were outstanding - I'm saying that the rules for their sport clearly state that you have to be 16 at the end of the Olympic year to compete. You'd think that with the huge talent pool in China (they start training olympians at age 3) that they could have found a couple more girls who were 16+.
5. The attitudes of nearly all the runners. Get over yourselves and be sportsmanlike.
   

I'm sure there is more that I could have listed, but I think that pretty much covers the major stuff. Thanks to Beijing for putting on a great summer games. I can't wait until Vancouver in 2010. Enjoy the closing ceremonies everyone!