Who are you rooting for in the Olympics?

[Seefutlung]

I would be rooting for the US Fencing team, but combat sports don't get televised like they used to. >

Actually Track and Field and the original Olympics were all about combat.

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[Dmitri]

I would be rooting for the US Fencing team, but combat sports don't get televised like they used to. >

Actually Track and Field and the original Olympics were all about combat.

Were they televised?

[bogeyguy]

I'm rooting that the City of London does not go bankrupt. I love the Olympics, but the costs are really getting out of hand. 42 million for the opening ceremony?? Estimated cost of the entire games, 25 billion??? IMO.

[gryphonslair99]

I root for good, exciting, clean competition between the athletes. All the rest is just a bunch of useless fluff.

[usayit]

Of course I want to the US team win....

but a bit of me is rooting for the Independent Olympic Athletes with no country representation. The three that made it to the opening ceremony looked like they were having so much fun just being there..... never seen such joy on TV. Three people from different walks of life probably just met recently and already look like they are long time friends.

[Kazooie]

Well I don't care about any of the sports except for the ones where there are hot guys in swimsuits, and even then I just want to see them again.

[Hobbytog]

Team GB then USA then anyone but Russia

[Dr_Totenkopf]

Actually Track and Field and the original Olympics were all about combat.

I know. I just wish NBC would understand that more people would watch Fencing or any of the original sports than pingpong...

The USA won wemen's skeet shooting but they only gave it a mention, insted of doing a play back if the last set.

[KenC]

I don't watch it anymore. I was reminded of one of the reasons when I saw a picture of a very young female gymnast - she had biceps I don't think anyone her age could attain naturally. I know the training is always getting better, but for quite a while now I've seen things that seem to indicate performance-enhancing substances are used routinely. Baseball players were looking like that until they really cracked down on it. I thought the Olympics were pretty strict but there are always ways to time these things to work around the testing or to use new substances that can't be detected yet. There is so much money at stake, at least for the people in medal contention, that it would be shocking if this sort of thing were not occurring, but it really detracts from the whole thing, at least for me.

[pgriz]

On the positive side, I love watching athletes compete. Those with humility and respect for their competitors get extra points in my book. Arrogance, and obvious sense of entitlement cheapen it. Efforts by totalitarian regimes to show that "their" system is the best for propaganda purposes - just demonstrate their hypocrisy with respect to the ideals of the Olympics. The commercialization of the Olympics, where it's all about the money... generally disgusts me. The reality is that to perform at the highest level in almost any sport these days requires lots and lots of money, and this is available mainly to rich countries or countries that use the Olympics for propaganda purposes. And if the objective is to accumulate a high medal count, irrespective of the merits of the individual athletes, then doping, influencing judges, and other dirty tricks are just means to an end. As KenC has noted, with the stakes being high, spending some money to find drugs and techniques that game the system, is probably happening much more than we suspect. In some ways, the monitoring works to find existing known forms of drugs, but it is very difficult to detect patterns of misuse if the protocols manipulate naturally-occuring substances. Blood doping is a rather crude example of this, but I'm sure there are extensive efforts expended to manipulate the body's normal systems of regulation.