Summer Olympics
The Olympics get major play around the Boyle household. Every two years we nestle up on the couch each night and root for the Americans in each sport. (Whoever came up with the idea to stagger the Winter and Summer Olympics deserves a Nobel or something. Genius.) The weekends are ripe for channel flipping through the comprehensive coverage by NBC, giving us a chance to watch sports we normally ignore, such as volleyball and fencing. With the last Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia, and the current ones in Beijing, we exercise limited Internet use to prevent accidental discovery of results from events that will be shown in tape delay during primetime.
This past weekend has already provided a summer's worth of excitement, with the incredible opening ceremony (which may have used a little Hollywood magic), Michael Phelps' early dominance, capped off by Sunday night's thrilling 4x100 freestyle relay come-from-behind victory, sealed by Jason Lezak's fingernail, and the U.S. women's gymnastic team's preliminary struggles.
Despite all the fun, I remember being surprised in 2004 when I learned that Beijing would host the summer games, with China's political and environmental problems. It has one of the worst human rights records and the smog in Beijing caused Ethiopian marathoner and world record holder Haile Gebrselassie to pull out of the event, instead running the 10,000-meters. Hopefully, the shining spotlight will educate casual viewers about China's issues, despite the amount of control the government is trying to enforce.