The World Competes

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,...

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 ...

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

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...

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

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

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

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...

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

The Opening Ceremonies have concluded for the first Youth Olympic Games, and the competition is about to start (within the hour, basketball and badminton will start; swimming will be shortly afterwards). You can watch the broadcast of the Youth Olympic Games live by going to the schedule and clicking on the event you want to see. There will be on demand viewing as well (the Opening Ceremonies are currently up). If you want to watch the events live, you’ll need to know how to translate...

Watch the Youth Olympics today. The first ever Youth Olympic Games starts today. I have not posted about it a lot lately because I wasn’t sure how people were going to watch it. You can watch about any sport that you want on television today… you can even watch the Visa Gymnastics Championships… but you can’t watch the Youth Olympics on television. I’m not sure why NBC isn’t playing even the opening ceremonies on any of its stations, but evidently infomercials are going to attract more...

China has promised to watch the ages of gymnasts closely from now on, both for the 2010 Singapore Youth Olympic Games and the 2012 London games. Recently, the 2000 Chinese Olympic team lost their bronze medal after Dong Fangxiao was discovered to be underage. The age discrepancy was discovered when Dong filed paperwork to be an official at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The US Olympic team will receive medals next month. Questions were also asked of the 2008 team; more than one of the athletes were suspected to be underage, although the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) has cleared them

Back in April, I wrote about Natalie Coughlin’s impressive swimming record, and how she was involved in other things, such as appearing on View from the Bay and getting married (she trains at Berkeley). At the time, I was not sure whether she was training for London 2012 or not. A recent report at TeamUSA.org notes that she is planning on competing in the 2012 Olympics. Not only that, she will have the chance to set some records. Jenny Thompson and Dara Torres both have twelve medals each. Coughlin has 11. One more medal, she ties the other swimming greats, two more medals, she becomes

Still a few days until the Tivo schedule arrives for the beginning of the Youth Olympic Games, but I’ve been hearing some chatter about how you’ll be able to watch the games. According to a Facebook conversation that I was able to read, NBC owns the rights to the Youth Olympic Games in the United States, and some of the parents were told that the games would be covered on television. How much of the games will be covered remains to be seen. Since this is the first Youth Olympics, many of us don’t know what to expect. I have seen commercials on YouTube for coverage, but I

On July 23rd, the Youth Olympic Flame was lit for the very first time. The ceremony took place in front of the ancient temple of Hera, where people dressed as ancient priestesses lit the flame using a concave mirror. Photos of the can be seen on Facebook. The flame will travel to Mexico City, Berlin, Dakar, and Seoul before it heads to Singapore for the game’s beginning on the 14th of August. What I’m wondering is why do the Olympic organizers only think there are five continents? Has there been a change in international agreement on what a continent is, in the same way that Pluto