Thoughts on the Olympics' first week

I woke up early this morning to watch the U.S. beat Spain live in basketball, one of the few live events I've seen this year. (Which reminds me, I screwed up again on the 200 IM, accidentally checking Phelps' Wikipedia page for his career medals breakdown before the race was shown live in Mountain time. Thanks again, NBC!)

Anyway, the Americans—or Redeem Team, as they are so cutely called this year—dominated the Spaniards with superior athletic ability. Fittingly, Coach K had us looking like a Duke team, except like one from the late-90's, when they were good: they combined pressure defense and exquisite ball movement. Carmelo continued his torrid shooting with four threes, and Dwyane Wade especially continued his great play. LeBron James was good today but overall my opinion of him is almost down...he's still a little too prone to the what-the-heck-are-you-doing-type plays where he pulls up for a three when it's far from the best shot. However, he pulls some of them off, too, and has had some sick blocks already in the tourney. It has been a blast watching the U.S. team and I feel much better about our gold medal chances.

I watched the team competition in women's gymnastics, but not the individual all-around. After watching Nastia Liukin in the team competition I wasn't remotely surpised by her gold medal win; she was awesome under pressure. Even though I couldn't care much less for her sport it's always cool watching people come through like that. I felt bad for the telegenic Alicia Sacramone, who hurt the U.S. team when she fell off the balance beam, but as a fan was kind of annoyed by how rattled she was by it. I almost knew she'd make a big mistake on the next event, the floor exercise, where she fell again. For once, though, I was grateful for the tape delay, because I checked online to make sure we were just getting silver, then immediately went to bed. I also realized that by the next Olympics I will be way too old to call even the older gymnasts attractive ever again.

Does anyone remember the quote-unquote scandal of the American track-and-field guys showboating in Athens? Shawn Crawford and Justin Gatlin were winning the 100m semifinals, and one of them (I think Crawford) turned to the other one and started waving at him to go by. NBC announcer and former Denver Nuggets forward Tom Hammond laid into them for what I guess he thought was bad sportsmanship, but which I thought was just two guys fired up in the moment. Anyway, so tonight in the 100m final Usain Bolt slowed near the end to celebrate early, too, spreading his arms out and thumping his chest. I didn't hear a single negative word about it, nor did I want to. Combined with the public perception of the last few Dream Teams, it made me wonder, do Americans hold each other to a higher standard, and if they do, isn't that kind of stupid?

I can't decide whether I liked or hated the swimming announcers. On one hand, I liked the insight and how they were willing to make predictions, or tell me that some team leading a relay didn't really have a chance because the rest of their team was weak or whatever. And they were always right on that stuff. However, they had this weird way of trying to manage my expectations that felt annoying. Outside of Phelps, I liked watching the whole U.S. men's team and the women, too, at least when Katie Hoff wasn't cranking her goggles tight an inch deep into her skull. I especially liked watching Dara Torres, who first competed in the L.A. Olympics (!) and almost won gold in the 50m free tonight. It's cool to see a veteran getting it done like that.

Microsoft Silverlight, the plug-in for watching video on NBC's Olympic website, slowed my work and home desktops to a crawl and delivered intermittent choppiness on both streaming events and replays. The framerate smoothed out on my MacBook under both Vista and OS X, so there is hope if buying a new computer just for the Olympics makes sense to you. Still, I got the sense that the video experience was precisely engineered to be watchable, but also just bad enough that TV would always be preferable. I am pretty glad to be able to catch some stuff live, though. I hope in 2010 things look better and we can watch everything live.

NBC, on the whole, has been awful so far. The tape delay is absolutely killing me, and I saw the results to the men's 100m track final today about fifteen times on the Internet before it was televised. As always I love the replay of that race from the camera that glides alongside them...that always looks so epic. But for nights when I could be watching Michael Phelps live, but instead am stuck hearing about the mating habits of panda bears, I give out only one grade: F-.