Friday, Jul 4, 2008
The Olympics haven't officially started, but they've started. Plus: Everybody out of the stadium! And: An interstate home run.
Aug 11, 2004 | Ready for the Olympics? By the time you read this, they will have started, with four women's soccer matches getting underway at 11 a.m. EDT. The U.S. plays Greece in one of them, on the island of Crete.
Greece is a soccer-mad country, especially in light of its upset win in Euro 2004, but it's not mad for women's soccer. The Greeks only qualified because they're the host nation. Eight American women of Greek descent were recruited for the team, which is not expected to do a lot of scoring or winning.
Soccer starts two days before the Opening Ceremonies to give it enough time to hold a full tournament, although it wouldn't be impossible to start Saturday and still end on time. Take away a couple of off days and play the men's gold-medal game the same day as the bronze-medal game, same as the women, and there you go. It's nice that they get two off days between games, but there have been Olympic boxers who have had to fight twice in the same day, so concessions can be made to the schedule.
But nobody asked me, and if they want to start playing two days earlier, fine. Fine. Seems a little bush league, but fine.
The other matches Wednesday are Japan-Sweden, China-Germany and Australia-Brazil. The men get going at 1:30 p.m. EDT, but the Americans aren't playing so who cares.
Just kidding! The four men's games are South Korea-Greece, Mexico-Mali, Australia-Tunisia and Serbia and Montenegro-Argentina. That's a tough match for the Argentines, having to beat Serbia and Montenegro.
But that business about only American athletes likely to win medals making it onto American TV screens is one of the two biggest complaints I hear from readers about Olympic coverage -- and I hear a lot of complaints. The other big one is about the sappy up-close-and-personal features on the athletes, which can be summed up as: An illness, injury or death in the family has been bravely overcome.
NBC is devoting 1,210 hours to the Olympics on the big network and a record number of hench-networks: CNBC, MSNBC, Bravo, USA, Telemundo and NBC-HDTV. That's about three times more coverage than in Sydney four years ago, so there ought to be time for more events where Americans aren't favored to win.
Men's basketball, for instance.
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