The World Competes

The Olympic Torch relay is now underway (I’m watching the torch lighting ceremony that’s taking place in Greece as I type this). The Olympic flame has been lit in Greece, and now the torch will travel from Greece and around the United Kingdom, until it finally arrives at the opening ceremonies in London.

I’ve never ran with the torch, but I did get to participate in the torch relay for the 1996 Atlanta Games. Los Angeles had been the last city to host the Olympics that year, and I was going to college at USC at the time. They asked for some Navy ROTC volunteers to carry the flag for the torch relay when it began in Los Angeles, and I thought that it would be something exciting to do. I got to carry the American Flag.

It should be an exciting summer. Michael Phelps is expected to compete again this year, and he could break the record for the number of career gold medals. Of course, there is always a lot of excitement when it comes to running, gymnastics, and all the other great sports of the summer games. Unfortunately, I’m going to be in Texas for the first couple of days; fortunately, I have a Tivo that will be able to record everything for me.

On a personal note, this year my kids will probably take more interest in the gymnastics part of the games. My daughter just made her gymnastics team, and my little boy is just starting to learn a few skills of his own (I was very impressed that he was able to do a handstand against the wall the other day… not bad for a five year old). We get to see a lot of impressive gymnasts on a regular basis (my kids train at the gym USA Olympic team member Alexander Naddour’s dad owns, so we’ll definitely be rooting for him), but it will be great to see the best in the world.

78 more days to go!

It’s hard to believe that the 2012 Olympics are only a few months away. I’m still a little nervous that World War III might erupt before they start and end up cancelling the Olympics, but we can hope for the best. In the meantime, there are new stories to cover.

One of them is the feel-good story of Nur Suryani Mohamed Taibi, who will be competing in the Olympics for Malaysia while 8 months pregnant.

I’ve heard stories of people who gave up their Olympic dreams to avoid having an abortion, and I’m sure that there have been more than one Olympian who did have an abortion to compete in the Olympics; good for her that she will still be competing (although I’m not sure if this story would occur in one of the more competitive countries).

I know some people who stop exercising entirely while they’re pregnant. They’re afraid that something might happen to the baby. I personally have kept exercising with both of my babies – with my daughter, I had the opportunity to work out with Billy Blanks once when I was about six months pregnant. I wasn’t able to perform as strongly as before, but I still exercised.

It will be interesting to see how she does.

British Royals have announced that Prince William and his wife Kate have been named ambassadors for the London 2012 Olympics. Other British athletes from previous Olympics have also been named ambassadors. The couple married earlier this year in a widely televised wedding.

Olympic ambassadors are chosen to encourage and inspire the public to get behind the Olympics. With Prince William and Kate’s popularity, I’m sure that they will be able to do an outstanding job with this.

The London Olympics are scheduled to begin on July 27th, and should run through August 12th. Between then and now, there will also be the first Winter Youth Olympics, which will be held in Innsbruck. The 2010 Summer Youth Olympics, held in Singapore, were poorly distributed, in my opinion. With the excellent technology that is now available, hopefully they can do a better job making the Winter Youth Olympics available for people who want to see them. My suggestion: make the broadcasts available on both the computer and on the Internet via Roku. Of course, the London Olympics will be widely available.

The London Olympics are only 470 days away. I hope that they turn out well; I wish I could be there, but I’ll probably have to wait until 2016 Rio before I get the chance (if the world’s chaos has cleared up by then, or at least has not gotten so bad that they don’t hold the Olympics then).

If you want to get tickets to the games, now is the time to act. They are taking applications for the tickets between now and April 26th at Tickets.london2012.com, if you are a resident of the United Kingdom or of one of the designated European countries. If you’re a US citizen like me, you’ll have to get your tickets through Cosport.com, the official ticket reseller. If you’re from another country, you can check the ticket availability page to see where you can buy your tickets.

For more information about the 2012 Olympics, I am keeping a Squidoo page on the subject.

Gymnastics is one of my favorite Olympic sports. It’s one that I can’t do, but I like to watch it because it is so beautiful. Both of my kids are in gymnastics, but they’re very low-level (my 4 year old was just promoted to the boy’s novice class, and my 8 year old is level 3). Even still, I love to watch the team gymnasts at our gym practice.

Gymnastics takes quite a bit of strength and balance… and years and years of training. You sometimes hear stories of runners taking up running in high school, but a good deal of the gymnasts that you see at the elite level have been practicing since they were little. It takes a lot of talent, but it also takes years and years of practice.

I think I like ladies’ gymnastics better, but they’re both awesome. There’s always some dramatic moments in the Olympics. You have to hope that your team doesn’t fall or make a fatal mistake, and hope that nobody gets injured.

Pictured here is a photo from the 1896 Athens Olympics. They did their gymnastics outside. That would be a pretty weird sight to see.

I love watching the athletes from the smaller countries. We expect to see the United States, Russia, Great Britain, Canada, and the other big countries get medals, but it’s not as often that you get to see somebody medal from one of the smaller countries. Like when Lithuania almost beat the United States in basketball (they went on to get the bronze medal) in the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

It’s not always about who wins. Sometimes it just matters who has the most heart. Who overcame the obstacles. I think that’s one of the reasons we were interested in the Nancy Kerrigan story. People from small countries don’t have a huge financial backing, like some of the higher-end athletes from the wealthier countries get (yes, I realize that most of them make extreme sacrifices too, but you do get more with nice sponsorships).

Today the A to Z blogging challenge continues… with performance enhancing Drugs. They really annoy the snot out of me, especially when we’re dealing with team sports.

Take the 4×400 meter relay. One guy in the race can screw up the whole medal scheme for everyone else. In the 2000 men’s 4×400 meter relay, Andrew Pettigrew cheated, and everybody else on the team ends up losing their gold medals. It’s great if you’re Nigeria, Jamaica, or the Bahamas (they get their status upgraded and walk away with better medals), but for the other five members of Team USA, it’s quite messed up.

The women aren’t off the hook either. Crystal Cox, who is probably remembered more for her performance on Survivor Gabon, was found out to have used performance-enhancing drugs after running during the heats of the 4×400 relay in 2004. She lost her medal, and the Olympic committee is still trying to decide whether or not to make the others lose their medals. In the favor of the gold-medal winning team is that she ran in the heats, not the finale. We still have to wait on the verdict for that one.

It’s bad enough when you take drugs and screw up your own career, but when you go and mess it up for everyone else, it’s pretty annoying.

Some of my favorite events to watch are things that I can do… or at least… that I could dream about doing. One of the events that I like to watch in the summer Olympics is cycling.

There are a lot of different cycling events. Some are short events that take place on a track. There is a long road race; in Beijing, riders were able to ride by some great places like the Forbidden City and the Great Wall of China. BMX has recently been added to the Olympics.

Cycling seems to be a popular sport with Olympians that compete in both the Winter and Summer Olympics. You may remember Chris Witty (another C word), who took the gold in the 1000m women’s speed skating event in Salt Lake City. Although she didn’t medal, she did place fifth at the cycling time trials for the 500m event. Clara Hughes received a gold medal in the 5000m speed skating race in the Torino Olympics, as well as two bronze medals in the 1996 Atlanta games.

Rio de Janiero

As most followers of the Olympics know, the Olympics are scheduled to be in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, in 2016. I’m looking forward to these Olympics, because I might actually be in a financial position to attend: my husband will have been out of law school for a few years, and I will have been writing for about seven years, and should be making some decent money by then. However, the growing world situation concerns me. Will there even be an Olympics in 2016?

The Olympics have been cancelled three times due to world war (Berlin 1916, Tokyo 1940, London 1944). Today’s world situation doesn’t look very good. Almost every country in the Middle East is experiencing uprising at the moment. In London, rioters were shouting “off with their heads” at Prince Charles and his wife Camilla. There is instability in much of Europe, and the United States, while avoiding actual riots so far, isn’t really in a position of harmony. As Rio 2016 is more than five years away, you have to wonder what will be going on at the time.

We can hope that whatever unrest is in the air will resolve itself by the time the 2016 Olympics roll around. We’ll have to just wait and see what happens.

Today is day 1 of the A to Z blogging challenge. London is a little more than a year away (and the Innsbruck Youth Olympics are less than a year away now), so it’s time to brush off the Olympics blog and get ready for the next one.

The last time the Olympics were held in London, the world was just pulling out of World War II. The Olympics were actually cancelled in 1940 and 1944 because of the war — the world just wasn’t feeling the Olympic spirit at the time. So in 1948, London held the Olympics. They called it the Austerity Olympics. Although the war was over, rationing was still in effect, and there were still some people left homeless by the war. It was a difficult time economically, and London took a less showy approach to the games.

I don’t know how the games will go in 2012. Some in London have called for austerity once again, but who knows whether that will happen. I was thinking the other day about how the economy could affect athletes for years to come. Are there kids my daughter’s age who could be Olympic champions, but who have parents that send their child to the gym less (or not at all) because they can’t afford it? Are there athletes who have had to hang it up because of the lack of funds? I’m sure that this has happened.

Whether London 2012 is another austerity Olympics or not, we’ll have to wait and see. Sure, the Beijing Opening ceremonies were fantastic, but is that really why we watch the games? The most important thing is the competition. That won’t be ruined by any austerity program.