Beijing Olympics

Leading up to the Beijing Olympics, I was getting fairly excited.  Although I would rarely ever watch swimming, diving, rowing, or many track and field events on a regular basis, I seem to have difficulty pulling myself away from the TV while they are on during the Olympics.  Watching the Olympics in Korea proved to be an entirely different experience.

95% of the events that are televised have Korean's competing in the events.  This seems normal enough, but for the most part, Korean's don't compete in the most thrilling of sports.  The first few days of the Olympics, the only thing you could see on TV was archery, air pistol and judo.  Korea won a bunch of medals in these events, and the TV stations made it their goal to remind everybody about this by airing replays of the events, and creating "exciting" commercials.  The commercials were incredibly cheesy, and usually had theme music such as Celine Dion and Faith Hill.  There's only two reasons to choose this music.  One, they randomly selected some English tracks, and happen to stumble upon some of the worst music ever, or two, this kind of music gets everyone here pumped up (obviously excluding me).  At first the commercials seemed like a nice idea, despite their obvious faults, but after a few days, and seeing the same commercial aired every 10 minutes, I began to despise them.  I don't believe I ever seen commercials like this in Canada, but if there is, please leave a comment and update me on it.  I would hope we aren't airing Celine Dion themed tributes to our medalists.

Luckily I was able to watch the Michael Phelps show, as there was a strong Korean swimmer named Park Tae Hwan.  He actually won a gold medal, but not in the same race as Phelps. Obviously that was impossible.  Other than swimming, and the finals of the 100m mens and womens sprints, I was left watching sports I had never seen aired in Canada such as table tennis, tae kwon do, judo, archery, badminton, fencing and weight lifting.  Well maybe I've seen weight lifting, but the rest of them I'm certain I haven't.  When your limited to these sports, the olympics aren't quite as exciting, and your actually forced to get into these sports.  Not an easy task, because I had no idea how the hell scoring worked in judo, tae kwon do, and fencing, so I had to google it.  Too much effort for me.

To top off the Olympics, Korea won the gold medal in baseball.  Along their path to gold, they defeated Canada 1-0.  A very close game, but one that both the children and some of the teachers reminded me of on numerous occasions.  I tried to let them know that Canadians playing in the MLB were not allowed to participate, but they weren't listening.  Another thing I was told about during most of the Olympics was the Korean medal total.  For the first while, it was a hard subject, considering Canada didn't get a medal for ages.  In the end, Korea ended up with 31 medals (13 gold) and Canada had 18 (3 gold). 5 less golds then Michael Phelps.