Date: Thu, 1 Aug 1996 21:39:08 -0600 From: mag@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Tom Magliery) Subject: olympics notes LG and I went to the first week of the Olympics, along with Kathy and Vern and Molly and Dean. (Molly is Kathy's sister, for those who don't know. If you don't know who Kathy and Vern are, well, you'll just have to deal with it.) We drove down to GA on Saturday the 20th and returned on Saturday the 27th, giving us 6 full days in Atlanta. We stayed at my dad's house outside of Newnan, about 35 miles southwest, at considerably better of a rate than press reports would have you believe people are getting. We were safely asleep there when the bomb went off in Centennial Olympic Park late Friday night. Rather than a day-by-day description of the trip, what follows is a collection of assorted and unsorted thoughts on the Olympics, Atlanta, our experiences, etc. The first day (Sunday) we went to gymnastics in the morning and baseball in the evening. The gymnastics was the opening round of women's compulsories. The US team was not in this flight, but we got to see Romania and Ukraine, among various others. Compulsories are a bit weird, and nothing at all like you see on TV. They have floor exercise, uneven bars, vault, and balance beam going on at the same time (women's), and four teams doing them. The teams all march out in 4 little parades, led by a staff type person holding up an identification flag. After a little parade around the floor, they each end up at their apparatus and the teams line up in front of the judges. The athletes all take their turns on their particular apparatus. The floor exercise finishes last, because each individual takes a little longer. In the meantime, the other teams just kind of hang out. When all four teams have finished on one apparatus, they have another little parade (actually, 4 little individual parades) where they all walk the long way around the arena floor to the next apparatus in the rotation. Repeat two more times. An (obvious) feature of the compulsories is that all the athletes do exactly the same routines on each apparatus (modulo mistakes). In the case of the floor exercises, this means you get to hear the same music played (over the PA system for the benefit of the entire arena) over and over and over and over. I'm convinced that one of the reasons that "they" are doing away with the compulsories after this olympics is that the judges, athletes, and fans were being driven slowly insane by the floor music. As an added bonus for me, the guy sitting next to me whistled along with it. Every single time. I was pretty disappointed in the TV coverage of the gymnastics. My main beef, I guess, was that it was nothing like being there. Remember how I said that the floor exercises are the last to finish? Now remember the "dramatic" vault by Kerri Strug that gave the US women the gold medal in the all-around? Well, the Russians happened to be on the floor during the same rotation (the last one) that the US women were on the vault. This means the Russians weren't done yet when Strug did that vault. This means that the Americans (and everyone else) couldn't possibly have known at the time she did that vault that it was good for the gold. (It also means that they had no way to know that she needed to do it at all.) The TV broadcast was pieced together with commentating added to make it all very melodramatic (such as showing on the screen, as she prepared for the final vault, the score she needed to beat). In retrospect, I realized that after a couple of the other rotations that night, the TV announcers had pointedly remarked things like "Gee, Kerri Strug really anchored the team on that apparatus". Just more BS to add dramatic effect. So anyway, that gave me a cynical view of the television coverage that has continued to fester and grow through this second week. Watching it feels like watching 4 hours worth of the sports segment on the evening news, what with their only showing the highlights of the most visible sports. Bleah. Okay, end of rant. The baseball game we saw was between Cuba and Japan. As baseball games go, you can't get much better than this one, although the beginning was weird. Japan batted first. The Cuban pitcher hit the first *two* batters, then struck out the next two. I can't remember what happened for the 3rd out, but no runs were scored. The Cubans scored 3 in the bottom of the 1st. The Japanese scored one (a solo homer) in the top of the 2nd. The Cubans scored 3 more in the bottom of the 2nd. The Japanese scored another solo homer in about the 4th or 5th. The Cubans might have scored another run or two somewhere. Then the Japanese came back and tied it up with a big rally in the top of the 8th. No score in the 9th. The Japanese scored one in the top of the 10th (to the delight of the crowd), but the Cubans came back and scored 2 for the win in the bottom of the 10th. Quite cool (except that I was rooting for the Japanese from about the 2nd hit batter onward). As we walked into the Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium (the baseball venue, which is adjacent to Olympic Stadium), LG said "Hey, is that the flame?", and pointed to a gigantic flaming box of McDonalds french fries atop Olympic Stadium. Sure enough. I hadn't even thought about seeing it before that. Naturally we took the obligatory picture or five. We rode public transportation to and from the games each day. Drove into a park-and-ride station, then caught a shuttle bus to the train station, then rode the train (MARTA) into Atlanta. For beach volleyball we had to catch another shuttle bus after that. The rest of our venues were near train stations. The transportation system got a lot of bad press, especially from the international press, but we only had a problem once. A non-existent bus failed to take us from the train station back to the park-and-ride one day, and the whole trip eventually took 3 hours. Overall, though, it seemed to us all the transportation went well. We think the international press types are probably just spoiled by generally flawless and ubiquitous public transportation in their own countries (based on our experiences abroad). MARTA gave us our most (disgustingly) humourous experience of the trip. You really had to be there, and probably had to be as tired as we were, to appreciate the humour in the situation. It transpired from musings on sardine-packed train cars, sweat-soaked nylon hand straps, and thirst. Probably best if the details are left to the imagination (or not). There were multilingual announcements on the MARTA trains, which we thought was pretty cool. It seemed to be only the "Welcome to MARTA, the transportation system of the Olympics" type announcements (as opposed to the "The next stop is so-and-so" announcements), but it was still neato. There were several different languages, at least half a dozen or so. Monday night we saw men's basketball. First game was Argentina vs. Lithuania. Second game was USA vs. Angola. The first one was the better of the two games basketball-wise (but don't ask me who won :-/ ), but it was quite cool to see the USA team, to see all the big (in more ways than one) NBA stars in person. Of course, I had seen one of them several times in person long before he was a Dream Teamer. (Give yourself 3.7 bonus points if you know who it is.) On Wednesday we saw beach volleyball, 3 men's matches and one women's, all featuring US teams. Match 1, (?) Whitmarsh and Mike(?) Dodd of the US beat Prosser/Zahner of Australia. Match 2, Karch Kiraly and Kent Steffes of the US beat Grigolo/Ghiurghi of Italy. Match 3, Sinjin Smith and Marc(?) Henkel of the US beat Maia/Brenha of Portugal. Match 4, Linda Hanley and Barbra Fontana of the US lost to Monica/Adriana of Brazil. Vern and Kathy and Molly and Dean were Olympics MadPeople. They went to well over twice as many events as LG and I did. In addition to going to all the same ones we did (one more still to come), they went to some judo, Greco-Roman wrestling, swimming, fencing, a whole day (8 hours) of tennis, and most of a day (6 hours) of track and field. And that's just the ones I remember. On Thursday we saw men's volleyball (an appropriate day, a couple of you will note). We saw Bulgaria vs. Argentina and the Netherlands vs. Italy. I learned something new: that what I would have called a "game" -- 15 points each, the best of 5 of which constitute a match -- is (at least in Olympic vball) called a "set". "Set" being such a cool word and all, I guess I can live with that. Argentina won in 4 sets, and Italy won in 3, but both matches were actually much closer than the scores showed, and very enjoyable. Bulgaria in particular seemed at least as good as Argentina, but just didn't get the right breaks. The attack, block, and dig stats for both matches tend to bear me out. Bulgaria: 90, 19, 75; Argentina: 94, 18, 82. Italy: 99, 12, 78; Netherlands: 91, 8, 76. Thursday afternoon and evening we spent lots of time wandering around in Centennial Olympic Park. It was a fascinating festival atmosphere. Amazing numbers of people. Gigantic sophisticated commercial displays. Hundreds if not thousands of shirt collisions every day. Three soundstages with continual musical events going on. We sat for a while and listened to an Irish folk band, Four Men and a Dog, and liked them so much we bought their CD. Hung around the fountain for the light and music show. Listened to a little bit of Travis Tritt from down at the other end of the park. Snapped a picture of Grant Hill from a few feet away as he, a couple of bodyguard types, and a massive herd of Pied-Piper-ified folks passed through. Saw Jamie Lee Curtis come out to model the Hanes T-shirt being auctioned off that night for some cause or other. All in all a very enjoyable experience. At the Swatch exhibition they had a bunch of timing-related equipment on display, like a little 10 or 15-meter "track" where you could get yourself timed and see a photo-finish. My favorite, though, was the little gizmo with which you could time the speed of your moving hand. It worked with 2 sensors; as you passed your hand between them, it measured the speed by clocking the times it passed by the 2 sensors. I watched a whole bunch of folks hammering their arms down through the space (reminded me of the Atlanta Braves' tomahawk chop) as quickly as they could, registering speeds ranging from 8 or 10 mph up to around 60 mph, but mostly wimpy speeds of around 20 or 30 mph or so. When my turn came, I just clapped my hands, moving one arm through one sensor and the other arm through the other sensor at the same time, causing the display to register 67 mph. The crowd oohed and aahed. I know I could have done *much* better, but I chose to walk off proudly with my subtle little victory instead. mag -- .---o Tom Magliery, Research Programmer .---o `-O-. NCSA, 605 E. Springfield (217) 333-3198 `-O-. o---' Champaign, IL 61820 O- mag@ncsa.uiuc.edu o---'