halplm wrote:US Men winning the Bronze in Team Gymnastics. If your not familiar with Raj Bhavsar, and I suppose you wouldn't if you don't follow Gymnastics, it was immensely satisfying to see him win an Olympic medal, not to mentnion the rest of the team
.
Anyone else have some highlights? Perhaps without such an obvious and unintentional US bias?
I didn't really watch the Olympics while they were on, but the TV happened to be on for the last couple miles of the womens' marathon, and it was nice to see Constantina Tomescu (a 38 year-old Romanian mother) win, despite never having heard of her before. I'm a sucker for what the commentary says - like when during the opening ceremony's flag-parade session they focused on Lin Hao.
However, though I did also accidentally see Usain Bolt winning stuff, the only sport I was really watching was the Mens' Gymnastics, but I was annoyed with the media's obviously US-centric coverage as I specifically wanted to see every event for the US, Japan, and China. I ended up having to watch the hours-long sans-commentary uncut videos on the NBC Olympics website, and have finished the team prelims as well as finals for high bar and most of the floor exercise - I still need to see rings, pommel horse, vault, parallel bars, not to mention the individual all-around stuff ...
I've mainly ignored the news of who's won what, but spoilers aren't really bothering me that much as I'm more interested in seeing the actual performances than hearing who won things. I mean, some of them made mistakes (sometimes big) in their routines and therefore weren't mentioned in reports, but their routines were awesome otherwise. Like Kohei Uchimura on the pommel horse, or Makoto on floor (for team - prelims? can't remember). I wasn't really impressed with what I saw from the Romanians and Germans for floor and high bar (esp. Flavius something on floor
), and therefore skipped over their bits in other events, though I did watch the Koreans in a few things.
Still have a lot to watch — I heard Hiroyuki Tomita messed up on rings, but I'm going to watch anyway ... it was sort of schadenfroh to watch Yang Wei accidentally
sit down on the bars when doing parallel bars in the team prelims, though.
Then again, I was sorta rooting for the Japanese but the three aforementioned countries' (US, Jap., China) routines kept literally inducing many many jawdropping moments, as I don't really follow gymnastics and was often like "Holy crap, they can do that?"
The womens' gymnastics was on TV one night and I watched for a bit - weirdly, I wasn't as impressed ... don't know why? Their routines didn't seem as good, maybe related to perhaps less 'powerful' from less arm strength? It just seemed different, and was never jaw-dropping ... any idea why?
