2012-08-23 Olympic Roundup (Finally!)

It took a while to get around to it, but finally:

So that now that the greatest* spectacle** on earth is over with***, what precisely will we remember?

This Olympics is always a memory of sights.  In no particular order:

We saw the Queen of England in a James Bond skit,

Phelps win lots of swimming medals by doing the same thing over and over again,

a gymnast needing only to land on her feet to receive the gold medal, but landing on her butt instead, and

the country of South Sudan participate without recognition or a flag. 

We saw a runner with no legs in a final,

random East German world records broken,

the long jump result continue to regress, a US 16-year-old nearly beat a Chinese player in table tennis as Bill Gates watched, and

1/400^th of Mitt Romney’s property compete.

We saw Usain Bolt continue to be the world’s fastest 100 m jogger,

Britain celebrate destroying its landscape to make way for factories,

Britain’s four football associations finally managing to cooperate long enough to assemble a football team together, and

said football team ritually losing in PKs to an underdog and vowing to never play together again.

We saw two teams playing in each other in badminton both try to lose the game,

a player get struck 4 times with one second on the clock to lose a fencing match by 1,

that the current Olympic appeals process now involves officially handing over Benjamins rather than unofficially handing them over, and

that someone important enough to handle the scoreboard at an Olympic event doesn’t know the difference between the North Korean and South Korean flags.

We saw McDonald’s grudgingly allow fish and chips at the concession stands,

a Phelps interview dubbed over a tribute to victims of terrorism,

all 302 events, as long as we could stream them at 6 am, and

announcers openly admitting to rooting for temperatures to warm so that female beach volleyball players would be required to wear bikinis.

We saw anti-aircraft guns atop apartments and the locals wondering why they have no Third Amendment,

a constantly updated count of the number of condoms distributed to the athletes,

announcers criticizing a poor relay performance by a US runner before learning that he ran the second half of his race having broken his leg, and

a 2-hour race decided by thousands of a second.

We saw countries win their first ever medals:  Guatamala, Cyprus, and Grenada, Trinidad and Tobago,

another Olympics with no medals for the 150,000,000 people of Bangladesh,

five days pass before the host nation won a gold medal, and

85 countries win medals.

 All in all we saw a pretty good show.

*Greatest number of events

**Or long series of interviews, depending on your broadcaster

***For two more years until the next Winter Olympics