i’ve been following the olympics somewhat; not that i want to though but because there’s really isn’t anything else on tv to watch. i’m actually somewhat annoyed with the olympics, stemming from the fact that there are 38273642553 commercials telling me that bell and royal bank are the official canadian olympics sponsors every hour and another 3782636223 commercials from companies too cheap to be official sponsors yet mock the olympics in their commercials like the samsung and the one with the cartoon cow selling god knows what product. give me a break, i know that we should all be patriotic and stand behind our country in this eternal struggle against the other nations of the country who btw are all our friends, but i’m tired of all these goodwill messages coming from companies who actually just want us to associate our loyalty to canada with buying their products. next thing you know, they’ll have athletes wearing advertisments for roots or some other canadian company owned by americans.

anyways it is really a tremendous effort to be the best in the canada at something and an even greater effort to be in the top three in the world at something, and i don’t mind much when canadian’s go crazy for the few medal winners that we have. it’s just annoying that there is such a big deal being made about something that happens every four years. it’s not even four years, because there will be as much and most likely more hoopla in two years for the winter olympics.

ok, so aside from my problems india also has a problem because india has never been very successful at the olympics, it’s surprising for a country with that many people to end up with only one medal in each of the past few olympics. in comparison, china is at the top of the leaderboard; perhaps all that is needed is for india to host the olympics like beijing is in four years time to get india to take sports other than cricket seriously (or maybe some communism).

one of the marvels of modern day olympics is that all the competitors are world class athletes, and the difference between the winner and the loser may only be a few seconds. this leads to a lot of bunching at the top in the men’s 100 meters sprint, the three medalist finished in 9.85, 9.86, and 9.87 respectively. now, a hundred years ago, perhaps even ten years ago, they might have tied for first place because the time differential between their sprints were too small. anyways, the technology being used to time athletes are taken for granted, but it is actually pretty cool and sophisticated.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: sports