Fighting Talker

As a certified Ring-Head*, I will be talking about the games quite a bit on here so be prepared. I am also adding a category to my blogroll with some of the better blogs devoted to the Olympics. Take a look, it’s good stuff.

* Ring-Head, \ˈriŋ\ˈhed\, a fan or journalist who likes and enjoys the Olympic games. Similar to Seam-Head, except doesn’t keep a poster of Peter Gammons above his bed.

The days of plausibly live matches, commerical interruptions and tape delay seem gone, as NBC has teamed up with two major cable companies to create four special all-Olympics channels including an all-soccer one.

One channel will be devoted exclusively to carrying men’s and women’s soccer games 12 hours a day, while a second channel will carry men’s and women’s basketball games 14 hours a day. A third channel will be broadcast in Mandarin and the fourth in Korean.

It sounds like they will be used primarly to complement the coverage already provided live by the standard NBC networks. This likely means that every single match of both the men’s and women’s Olympic soccer tournaments will be covered live and available in more US-time zone-friendly timeslots.

And good news to my primarily DC-based readers, Cox Cable (Fairfax County and Fredericksburg, Va.) and Comcast (almost everywhere else) have already agreed to carry the channels.

This isn’t a book review proper as he hasn’t released anything new, but I just wanted to take the time to highly recommend the work of British journalist Andrew Jennings. He specializes in shining the light on the dirty, dirty work of the IOC and FIFA. (more…)

The Olympic Men’s and Women’s Tournament Draws were today. US fans should be feeling pretty good.

On the men’s side, the US plays Holland, Nigeria and Japan. The Dutch will likely be fairly strong, with the most well-known player in the squad being Real Madrid’s Roylston Drenthe. They will also likely feature Jonathan de Guzman, sort of the Guiseppe Rossi of Canadian soccer. Nigeria will likely feature Chelsea’s John Obi Mikel. Japan is harder to read, with few if any players likely to come from outside the J-League. Of course, each team can call up three overage players, who will likely play a huge role on each of the squads. For now, I’d say the group is definitely “advancable,” if not winnable.

The women get a breeze of a draw with Norway, Japan and New Zealand. It’s impossible to imagine them not getting through that group. Then, like with most womens tournaments, it’ll likely come down to the Big 4 of USA, China, Germany and Brazil to decide the medals.

Here are the draws in full: (more…)

As a certified “ring-head,”* I’ve done a lot of thinking about whether it’s good or bad for the Olympics to be going to China this Summer. I’ve finally settled it and it’s becoming clearer and clearer that it is a bad thing for both the Olympics and for human rights efforts in China. (more…)