Olympics!

Opening ceremonies

Anybody watching the olympics? The opening ceremonies are an led fest! What a show!

Re: Opening ceremonies

Those ceremonies were really something. They have certainly set the bar high for whoever does the next Olympics. I especially liked the moveable type part. A fine job. Now if we can just keep politics out of the rest of the games.

Geoff

Re: Opening ceremonies

There was a guy in that part stood up a couple seconds too early but crouched back down in less than a seconds. Still quite noticeable, hope he won't get too much crap afterwards.

Re: Opening ceremonies

as part of the spectators package each person received among other things:
~Beijing 2008 multi-pattern illuminated wand
~Beijing 2008 torch design LED flashlight

those are the things you see lighting up in peoples hands.
How cool.
Yaesumofo

Re: Opening ceremonies

The ceremony was great! I loved it, can't say the same for the NBC commentators who keep making political remarks on every country they mentioned.

Ok, this thread was going to start at one time or another, so...

I love the olympics, it's always loads of fun to watch. I am definitely looking forward to the women's gymnastics events, by far it is my favorite event to watch. I also enjoy the target shooting, but they never show it on tv. Maybe I'll get lucky this time.

Commentary on the Opening Ceremony: Here in the States NBC completely botched the opening ceremony (as usual). I couldn't tell if I was watching commercials or the opening ceremony.The parade of nations was ok, though there were still too many commercial breaks. It's too bad, because it's just one of those things you can only enjoy in its continuous form.:shrug:

Either way I'm going to enjoy the games. Anyone have a favorite event/athlete?

PS- On a side note, I couldn't help but notice how many attractive female athletes there were. Sorry I just couldn't help myself.

Perhaps an event with the female gymnasts firing guns? Dudemar, you perv.

I'm a big Olympics fan, so I'll likely post in here a lot.
I've already done my gripe about NBC in another post so I'll try really hard to stay off my soapbox for that.

Well, there are so many things going on in, with, and about the Olympics... it's going to be a wild week. The opening ceremony was great if you're into performing arts. There's already trouble... which is too bad.

I've spent 10 years as a professional gymnastics coach, so I'll likely be doing a lot of commenting on this. I'm also a nationally accredited Men's Judge so for the 4 other people that are remotely interested I may get slightly technical.

For those of you who missed the New York Times article, or a link to it on /.
gymnastics scoring has changed in the past 4 years. Scores go past 10 now. As a matter of fact a score below 10 is really really bad. Depending on how NBC presents scoring it will either be incredibly confusing or just slightly odd.
Pretty much a basic breakdown of gymnastics scoring (for men) works like this:
A gymnast has a 10.0 base score. Deductions for form (like not pointing the toes etc) get subtracted off of this "execution" score. Any other technical deductions like stepping out of bounds, falling on one's butt, etc will also be subtracted from this score. So for a performance (routine in gymnastics terms) we still will get a score out of 10 just like we're used to.

However there will be a second score added to the end total as well. This is the "composition" part of the score. Here is where it gets pretty hairy and technical, but it has to do with how hard the gymnast's routine was and how well it was put together. I'll likely bore some people to death elaborating about this later.

I'll throw out that if there are any hardcore gymnastics fans here I'd be happy answer (or attempt to answer) any sort of technical question about gymnastics and the Olympic gymnastics competition. Anything from what the heck was that and how do you teach people to do it to why judges gave the score they did.

:wave:

The opening ceremony was just incredible! Excellently performed and the use of lighting incredible. Any LED-holic would have been drooling with eyes fixed on the TV . I wonder about the color led screen they rolled out and danced on! Tech data anyone?

JohnR66 said:

The opening ceremony was just incredible! Excellently performed and the use of lighting incredible. Any LED-holic would have been drooling with eyes fixed on the TV . I wonder about the color led screen they rolled out and danced on! Tech data anyone?

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+1...Incredible! They put on one hell of a show. No idea what the mega huge tv carpet thing was...but wow...:thumbsup:

Yep, I'm watchin'. I always watch the Olympics. I caught a little of the badminton last night (Can vs. USA) and little more this morning (INA vs. Ger). Badminton, table tennis and tennis are probably my three favorite sports, so I'll always be looking out to watch them. Unfortunately, Badminton mainly shows in the middle of the night, so watching it could be a problem. I'm curious to see how Howard Bach (USA) does this time. I like to watch swimming, too. Michael Phelps, I'm sure, is one we're all eager to watch, and, how about that Dara Torres? She's incredible! The last Olympics she swam, I believe, was in 2000. Before then, she had already retired, but she said she got the swimming bug and decided to try to make her 4th olympic team at the age of 33, which most people dismissed as wishful thinking. I believe she medaled, then. She retired again, and hadn't swam competitively for 7 years, but then, she said, she "got the swimming bug," again." Fourty-one years of age and making the olympic team? "Not likely", said most, but not only did she make the team, but broke some records in the process. I'm really hoping to catch her races. I'm sure they'll capture tons of media attention. Track and field is always interesting. Nearly every event is fun to watch, or, if not the whole event, at least the last part of it is. (5000m run, marathon...) I caught some women's clean & jerk, this morning, and it was pretty fun to watch, too. I'm sure many of us are anticipating the "Redeem Team's" perfermormance in basketball. They're sounding pretty cocky ("King James" guarantees gold), so that is really adding to the drama and excitement. It's probably generally accepted that our professional NBA ballers (Kobe, Lebron, etc..) are peerless in the sport, but the thing is, they don't normally play together, whereas some of the other teams have been playing together for years and really know how to work as a team, so that actually gives them an advantage. During the opening cermonies, the commentator said that in China, the most popular athletic jersey bought is not that of Yao Ming, but of Kobe Bryant, which was kind of surprising to me. Diving, gymnastics, weight lifting, cycling (including the new BMX!), and the others I mentioned will all be keeping me glued to the TV, over the next couple of weeks.

Oh, and regarding the opening ceremonies--how the heck did they do that? All those people holding the rising and falling boxes--they must have designed the entire program on a computer to devise the rise-and-fall timing for each individual box. It was incredible to see them make life like waves and other patterns just with those boxes being lifted up and down by people. Those drummers were incredible, too. First off, the shear number of them (2008) was a legendary sight. But the way the pounding of each individual drum caused their own drum to illuminate and the way they coordinated their drumming to form letters, numbers and characters was unbelievable. What really got me, though, was when those letters/numbers actually started to scroll from the side towards the middle, like a friggin' LED display. When I saw that, I first thought, "oooohhhh, it's just computerized," but then when they zoomed in and I saw each drummer pounding at the right time, I was, like, "holy crap, that's not a computer, the drummers are doing that!" Un-freakin-believable. The choreographing of some of those routines are monumental tasks, right up there with the building of the ancient pyrymids.

RyanA said:

Perhaps an event with the female gymnasts firing guns? Dudemar, you perv.

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You can't go wrong with girls firing guns, eh?:nana: Nastia Liukin comes to mind...

All jokes aside, I was watching Women's fencing on NBC. Mariel Zagunis (USA) sounded crazy! I could understand being excited about getting gold, but she just sounded so wrong.:shakehead Never mind the Tara-Lipinski-winning-the-gold-medal moment, this was downright bizarre.

The article PhantomPhoton posted was terribly sad. My heart goes out to their family.

Fencing is an AWESOME sport though. I was the undefeated fencing champ of my class for almost my entire senior year. Until I got beat by a girl... To this day I still think I could have won had I not been frozen in fear by the thought of highly contagious cooties.:sick2: But, I consider myself lucky to have gone to a high school that provided that opportunity.

if you guys noticed each of the individual 21000 different performers had ear buds in. at first i thought they were all in ear monitors then i got to thinking about how many wireless packs they would have to had and how many transmitters. so my buddy and i guessed that they were just cheap little radios and the venue was broadcasting either a click-track over the air or even a director/choreographer. what do you guys think?

and does anyone know where i can find a good video of the drums? i missed that part yesterday.

I want to see the drums too, the rest I got it recorded

I'm sure they could all be set to the same channel, but I think you're right a radio would be a more cost effective and probably more compact solution.

Another person here who totally looks forward to the Summer games every 4 years! It's just a great time from the opening ceremony all the way to the closing ceremony. Btw, was that opening ceremony awesome or what!? The swimming, gymnastics and track and field are loads of fun and exciting, and basketball and volleyball are good too. Anyone else going to be happier than normal for the next 2 weeks?

:twothumbs

Forgot to add....I agree too there are a lot of hot female athletes participating in the Olympic games!

I wonder how much the opening ceremony cost? $$$$$$$$$$

My favourite event is the mens 100m. I've been hooked on it for 20years now when Ben Johnson was my hero:huh:... Other then some of the cycling events (me being a cyclist) its about all I will watch. My money is on Powell for gold!

dudemar said:

...Anyone have a favorite event/athlete?

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The athlete I'm rooting for most is Michael Phelps (swimming) - he's on track to win more medals than anybody previous.
In this Olympiad, he already set a new world record in one of the swimmimg events. :thumbsup:
GO PHELPS!!!