Thursday, August 07, 2008

2008 Olympics from Sweden

The 2008 Olympics are coming. From Beijing or Peking or whatever you want to call it. China. And Sweden is starting to get a bit excited for it. Previews are dominating the printing presses, commercials are encouraging Sweden to go for gold (as opposed to silver or bronze which is nice to see from the Swedes), and blue and yellow is dominating, well… everything.

And I love it. The Swedish women’s soccer team might not feel the same way. They lost yesterday to the home nation in the group play of Olympic soccer. Technically the games don’t open until Friday. But even the Olympic committee realizes that group play in soccer isn’t exactly as riveting as, say, fencing and has scheduled the soccer games outside of the official Olympic opening. Or maybe there just isn’t time. But I like my reasoning better.

Maybe starting a couple of days early threw off the Swedes, who lost 2-1 to China. Now granted China has that home field advantage which has been shown to play a huge role in the overall Olympic medal count. Considering the air pollution and god only knows what the government has been feeding the Chinese athletes that advantage could be even more pronounced. But come on. Sweden is ranked third in the world. They are routinely named as medal contenders.

And they lost. I think I mentioned that. Obviously this is a bit of a crisis. Because after the poor showing by the men in Euro 2008, everyone was hoping the women could make some noise in the Olympics. Because to be honest, it isn’t looking that promising for the Swedes in the Olympics this year. Sure there are a few athletes who will be competing for medals, but in years past the Swedes have at least made a dent in the medal count considering their population of nine million isn’t much. But we’ll see. That’s why they play the games. Any given Sunday. All that cliché nonsense that tends to hold true in sports.

All I know is that despite the less than promising start for the Swedes, I plan to watch as much of the Olympics as I can. I have the advantage of being able to cheer for either the Americans or the Swedes without too much of a bad conscience. Of course the Americans lost to Norway in their opening game. Maybe I’ll just try to figure out what the catch is for this new Comviq thing that tells me I can sms (that’s Swedish for text) them and watch the Olympics on my phone for free.

I’m just excited to have a reason to write about sports for the next couple of weeks without it seeming overbearing. So welcome back to Welcome to Sweden.

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9 comments:

  1. Well, it's not exactly swedish. It stands for Short Messaging Service.

    But maybe you thought of its use as a verb?

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  2. The catch about Comviq's "free" Olympics service might be that you'll have to pay for all the data being transferred to your phone....

    Otherwise I guess there's some other catch, cause no mobile operators seem to give away such services totally for free...

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  3. @anonymous - I did mean it as the verb. good call on the clarification. if I were to ever say I was smsing someone in the US they wouldnt have the slightest clue what I was doing.

    @magnus - also a good call. I didnt think about the data transfer. Im going to have to check it out. because I agree. theres no way something like that could be given away completely gratis.

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  4. Yay fencing (my sport of choice)! Imagine if you only got to watch your favorite sport on TV once every 4 years. That is my lot :(

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  5. @jd - that's a rough sport viewing life is what that is.

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  6. I follow your blog for sometime and I like it. While I do not like comfortable to read sentences like 'god only knows what the government has been feeding the Chinese athletes'. It may be funny or sarcastic but it is really insulting to those hard training Chinese athletes. What do you feel if I describe US athletes in the same way? As we all know, their track records are not that clean...

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  7. @zhemin - that may be. but rumors have persisted for years about that sort of thing. now Im sure for the most part they are only rumors but theres nothing wrong with poking a bit of fun. and feel free to attack the americans for their athletic drug usage. I hate it and am disgusted every time an athlete is caught cheating. obviously not all of them are drugged, but enough are to make you question the system. but people still speak out about it. because to not do so would be to ignore the problem for fear of insulting those who are clean. thats just ridiculous.

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