Discuss.

Danny Boyle's directing the opening ceremony, James Bond showed up in an opening clip, and Mr. Bean helped play the Chariot of Fire track.

to be honest i dont plan on following much, too much all at once to keep track of, to me there all just games anyway

I ****ing love the Olympics because it's an opportunity for America to show the rest of the world how much better we are.

I wasn't much of a fan of a lot of the early stuff. Mostly because it seemed to drag on forever (like the "industrial revolution" part). Also, the torch, although it looked cool when it went up, seems kinda stupid after. Usually the torch is placed in a prominent area up high where it can be seen from other areas.

I should mention this is par for the course though, and good on Britain for doing it flawlessly regardless.

my tea chugger friends said it was really packed, that's about all i've heard

yeah

All proper Olympics (and other sports events, namely the FIFA 2002 tournament) feature Vangelis' music. Thus London 2012 is one of them. Absolutely everything else involved in any of them? I don't give a ****.

Can someone point out to me how exactly the US team's uniforms are representative of their country, because the design made me think France (they looked more french than even the uniforms the french team wore).

The opening ceremony started as a cross between The Shire and Telly Tubby Land. I have no idea what was going on and it went on too long. After that, it improved a little. The bit with James Bond and the Queen was fantastic as was Mr. Bean. The rest was pretty "meh."

Mr. Bean was a nice cameo. I grew up on his shows.

Somehow I always get a strange sense of patriotism when it occurs too. Hoping to see the U.S. basketball team destroy the other countries and for our gymnastic team to reclaim its glory.

It's well known that the host country usually sees ~50% increase in their medal count over what they would normally expect.

Especially when they host a game only their country is allowed to participate in

China were about even with the US in golds in 2004 if I remember rightly too.

Is that why China is already leading again?

If you use statistics this early on, in that case, Italy is going to kick everyone's ass, because they're second.

No, China is going to kick everyone's ass, because they're China.

I wouldn't be so sure, especially with their horrible showing at men's gymnastics yesterday (where damn near all of them were either injured or fell).

When trying to explain China's medal count my first thought always runs to their huge population, but obviously that's super-simplistic thinking since India does so poorly.

So I guess it's more to what extent the government supports it's olympic programs and cares about national pride.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-time_Olympic_Games_medal_table <- sort that table by combined medals

Also,

Am I the only one who confuses 'medals and metals' when talking about the olympics? It doesn't help my poor brain that the olympic medals are named after metals.

aghhhhh how can I watch the Olympics if I don't have TV service ahhhhhhh what do i do

let's see them win the gymnastics with underage girls again eh?

Underage girls are much more apt to be frightened when you threaten to kill their entire family if they lose.

It's probably a mix of a few things but India isn't as rich as China so doesn't have the facilities. The population point is valid though, more highly populated countries like China and the USA have a better chance at having top athletes, simply because there's more people in the country competing in a given sport. It would be interesting to see a medals table for previous olympics weighted to population!

I know this is probably over-exaggerated, but good god you can just see the terror in some of those poor girls faces. I watched one tonight that looked like she knew she was about to be sent to the acid mines or something.

acid mines

yessssssssss

Oh nationalism, you so silly :>

I don't have TV service and I've been watching on my bunny ears...

Damn it, I missed the women's gymnastics and the U.S. actually won the Gold this team. NBC has a replay right? I better not miss Team USA basketball either.

I wanna see AMERICA play men's basketball, as well...I saw some Finnish basketball dude on TV speaking about this, and he basically said that giving the US team so much as a challenge will be a feat from any team that manages to do that.

Also, in that same report they felt the need to specifically point out that there's only one white dude on the team. Silly Finland, with exposure to the outside world being the only time we see non-white people... <_<

I thought it was pretty funny that after being beaten by like 50 points, one of the guys from Tunisia's team went and got Kobe Bryant's autograph.

I like how us brits are only good at sports where you have to sit down.

That's pretty funny. Is there a YouTube video of that?

Apparently we smoked Nigeria in basketball. By 83 points. And that was with Kobe and LeBron being benched in the second half. Lot of shots just went in for them.

What's with this knee-jerk reaction to the Chinese swimmer Ye's performance.

Is that the one rumored to be using drugs?

Also, can someone confirm/deny that the drug tests are performed by the countries, not the Olympic committee? My grandmother says it's the former, but I find that hard to believe.

There's national drug tests, and then there's WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, which is ran by the committee. Your grandmother, being old, is probably thinking of some times gone by...mine does that all the time!

That would be easy enough to do yourself with wikipedia and 10 minutes! But this is more interesting I think: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18976333 Two models for predicting how a country should do, one based just on population size and wealth (US > China > Japan > everyone else) and the other which includes hosting bias and "winningness" (historical performance, probably largely due to investment in olympic sports) (US > Russia > China > everyone else). Nice to see that we do punch above our weight in GB.

I've taken a really long time to get into the olympics, because there has been so so much wrong with how they've been organised, and as a (former) Londoner I think it's a travesty. However, I'm slowly coming round to actually getting into the sport and cheering on the athletes (I saw a tweet today "it's like supporting the troops but hating the war", which sums up my feelings pretty well). We got a bunch of medals yesterday and we're hopefully inspiring a new generation of athletes.

I was also really excited this morning to watch the women's 100m preliminaries, for two women who are blazing a trail in their countries. Noor Hussain Al-Malki, from Qatar, and Tahmina Kohistani, the only female Afghanistani athlete at the olympics (who has had to endure men coming to her training sessions and booing her) appeared in the heats today but sadly didn't qualify. But still, a great moment for them and for every girl growing up in those countries.

On another pro-women note, special mention has to go to Nur Suryani Mohd Taibi, the first female Malaysian rifle shooter to ever compete at the olympics, who is eight months pregnant. Impressive.

Yeah, we never got a silver in Judo the other day.