London Olympics

 Most of you who know me know that I love sports.  And so naturally the Olympics, especially the summer Olympics, are an exciting time for me.  There are widely recognized sports that I enjoy such as basketball, soccer, and tennis, as well as the ones that most people see only every four years.  How many people passionately watch archery or competitive walking any other time?  Only during the Olympics could a strait man ask the bartender to turn on rhythmic gymnastics without anyone batting an eye.

Stateside the time difference for this year’s Olympics was convenient enough – you may have missed out on the morning sessions, but at least most of it was on during the day.  I heard though that NBC did a pretty good job of screwing up the coverage.  Korea, on the other hand, is 8 hours ahead of London.  So that means the primetime events, say at 8 pm, were on here at 4 am.  That really put a dent in my Olympics viewing time.  I saw some live coverage in the evenings, but a lot of it was on just too late.

 When the Olympics started it was immediately clear that Koreans go crazy for them.  Yes, people get excited back home about the Olympics, but not nearly as much.  Despite the time change people would stay up until the wee hours of the morning to watch the events live.  Koreans have all-night viewing parties at each other’s houses and then go to work in the morning!

The key variable regarding Koreans’ enthusiasm for different Olympic events was their athletes.  If a Korean was competing in a sport then everybody would be cheering for him or her.  And these people are household names.  For example the archers that won gold in London are now national celebrities.
Bo Bae Ki, gold medalist in London

In a way it was neat to experience such passion for one’s nation and its athletes, but I quickly tired of it.  To me there is a fine line between national pride and zealotry.  I guess I’ve always just been more interested in the sport itself than which countries are competing.  It also made for some not-so-interesting TV coverage.  The Olympics coverage was almost always of Korean athletes, who excelled in sports like Archery, Fencing, Judo, and Shooting, not exactly my favorites.  I know that US coverage is also annoying in that regard, but it seemed to be even more extreme here.  Replays of Korean athletes were often shown instead of live events.

There was a live screening of the Korea Japan football
match on the lawn of the Seoul city hall at 3:45 am

Take soccer as an example (I guess as an American I should refrain from calling it football).  Korea and Japan played in the Bronze medal match on a Friday night.  Well it was actually Saturday morning at 3:45 am.  A friend told me that an estimated 1/3rd of all Koreans watched the match live!  And of course there were more who watched the replays.  Emphasis on the plural there – the following night at 11 pm the Gold medal match was on, but the Korean TV channels were still showing the Korea-Japan game from the night before.  The bar I was in had to stream the match on the Internet because they couldn’t find any live coverage on TV!

Complaining aside, I did enjoy the Olympics.  Korea also did very well – 13 gold medals, 5th most overall!  Many of their strong events were in the first half of the games, and partway through the first week they were in third place (behind only the US and China)!  In terms of overall medals (28) Korea finished lower, 9th I believe.  For some reason most US news sites list the country rankings based just on total medals.  There is no way a bronze should equal a gold in value.  I think there should be a weighted system, say 4 points for gold, 2 for silver, and 1 for bronze.

I wish I could have watched more of the coverage, but I will just have to hold out until Rio in 2016!

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