This ain' no city champ'n'ship, it's the 'lympics!

Finally, the Olympics have started. The opening ceremony was ok. I have to admit, it didn’t live up to my expectations for some ridiculously awesome stuff put on by the Chinese, and the way the torch was lit was kind of lame (even though it was awesome that Li Ning, China’s most famous gymnast, got to light it). The lit drums at the beginning was awesome and at a calibur way beyond the rest of the ceremony.

The spirit of the games is also worth mentioning. I've been watching the Olympics on tv since 1996, but there's something about walking around the Olympic Park with the torch burning in the background that adds an intangible to the excitement of the games:



The past two days have been centered around the gymnastics. We got to see the USA Men’s and Women’s preliminary rounds. The nice thing about the entire Olympic venue being barricaded -meaning you must have a ticket for an event the day you want to enter the area, makes the entire Olympic Park much less crowded. The Olympic subway system is much more manageable this way as well as shopping in the Beijing Olympic store -which has all kinds of crap. Especially when China develops not one but five mascots for the games (one for each Olympic ring). However, this also makes finding people who want to sell tickets especially difficult, so we’ve been emailing classifieds off craigslist any chance we can- many of the postings are fakes but we’re hoping to get at least a couple more finals tickets over the next few days.

The meets themselves were awesome! The Indoor Stadium is really well designed and modern looking. Here are photos of the arena w/ the men’s equipment:





The USA had a really good meet- much better than I would have predicted. Our seats were not so good… extremely high up and far away. Ryan, Dave, and I managed to sneak down to the lower levels after a couple rotations though and so we ended up in really good A category seats. That was something that bugged us- ticket demand is really high right now, apparently, but there were still a large portion of empty seats scattered around the arena. Additionally, there is apparently a large portion of reserved seating- maybe a third of the stadium- that went completely unused. I guess the people they’re reserved for don’t care to see the qualification rounds, aren’t interested enough, whatever. Anyways, its pretty lame that so many seats go unused when there are plenty of people who appreciate Artistic Gymnastics who would gladly buy tickets to those seats.

This is us in the venue:



The women had an OK qualification round. Barring some shaky bars routines we did very well over all, about as expected as the USA girls dominate the field.

Scott, if you’re reading this (and I know you are, you Juno lover!) this picture’s for you: