The Olympics Are Great!

I can sit on my duff at work and Yahoo tells me that the USA now has 16 Gold medals and leads the field. I think I'll celebrate my (country's) athletic prowess with another diet Coke. Urrp!

I did accidentally watch some Women's team archery on TV. This is one of those events that the American networks supposedly don't cover because we don't have a chance.

Well, it made for riveting TV. These women have these hi-tech bows that come with tripod rests and they bring them up, string to their chin and then release. The camera then cuts to another close up of the target. Basically everyone gets very close to a bulls eye and you never see a arrow really fly. You just see a close up of a woman's face with a string on her chin and then an arrow pops into the target.

And in archery, where the action is, fundamentally, a tiny twitch of the fingers, closer is better and close-up is best of all. So in Beijing, there is a camera on rails at their archers’ feet. A third of the way down the range, three huts hide cameras that capture every twitch of their facial muscles and every wobble of their bow as they fire. When the athletes peek through their binoculars, they should be able to make out the camera lens buried in the bulls-eye. There is even a camera with super slow-motion that makes visible the frequent bucks, wriggles and skids in the flight of the arrows, as the arc through the air at 200-kilometers, or 125 miles, an hour.

Apparently the Taiwanese TV channel didn't pay for the premium feed, because all we got was the facial close up and then the arrow arriving in the target. No slow motion of the arrows at all.

South Korea beat the Chinese to win the Gold.