I wanted to post some follow-up to my prior post about sports where the contestants go to the edge and fall down. As I see it, the sports fall into the following rough classes:

Some notes from the bi-annual Olympics crackfest...

I'm starting to say that Curling might be the best Olympic sport. Why?

• It's the most dominated by strategy. It also requires precision and grace, but above all the other Olympic sports, long pauses to think about the game are part of the game. If you haven't guessed, I like strategy.
• Yes, other sports have in-game strategy, of course, particularly the team sports. And since the gold medalist from 25 years ago in almost every sport would barely qualify, you can make a case that all the sports are mostly mental in their way. But with curling, it's right there, and I think it edges out the others in how important it is.
• While it requires precision and athletic skill, it does not require strength and endurance to the human limits. As such, skilled players of all ages can compete. (Indeed, the fact that out-of-shape curlers can compete has caused some criticism.) A few other sports, like sharpshooting and equestrian events, also demand skill over youth. All the other sports give a strong advantage to those at the prime age.
• Mixed curling is possible, and there are even tournaments. There's debate on whether completely free mixing would work, but I think there should be more mixed sports, and more encouragement of it. (Many of the team sports could be made mixed, of course mixed tennis used to be in the Olympics and is returning.)
• The games are tense and exciting, and you don't need a clock, judge or computer to tell you who is winning.

On the downside, not everybody is familiar with the game, the games can take quite a long time and the tournament even longer for just one medal, and compared to a multi-person race it's a slow game. It's not slow compared to an even that is many hours of time trials, though those events have brief bursts of high-speed excitement mixed in with waiting. And yes, I'm watching Canada-v-USA hockey now too.

NBC has had just a touch of coverage of Michael Phelps and his 8 gold medals, which in breaking Mark Spitz's 7 from 1972 has him declared the greatest Olympic athlete, or even athlete of all time. And there's no doubt he's one of the greatest swimmers of all time and this is an incredible accomplishment. Couch potato that I am, I can hardly criticise him.

Found a thread on avsforum where NBC's engineers are participating. Turns out it would be very simple for them to include a second audio stream without the commentary. In addition, this has apparently been done by some European broadcasters.

Note 1: NBC doesn't have nearly enough HD cameras for the Olympics, and I can't really blame them for not having one for every section of luge track to show us something for half a second.

But it seems in many areas they are showing us a widescreen image from an SD camera, and it looks more blurry than the pillarboxed SD footage they show of past scenes. I wonder, are they taking a cropped widescreen section out of their 4:3 SDTV camera? If so, that's not what I want. Or are there a lot of 16:9 SD cameras out there?

I finally watched the closing ceremonies yesterday (did not see them while at Burning Man, obviously.) I liked the blinky balls that the children and audience members had, and the sense that the flame lit the LED ball. But it was just manual, people pushed buttons.

As I watch the Olympics on my Tivo, I'm having a hard time understanding how anybody could watch them without one. The number of events has become immense, and the coverage is 24 hour -- more than that, because I have both CBC and NBC coverage. (Plus CNBC, MSNBC and others, and I could buy TSN and Country Canada if I were desperate.)

At the Olympics, only in equestrian events do men and women compete on an equal footing, since it's about control of the horse, not strength. There used to be a truly mixed event in shooting (skeet and trap) but these were split in the 90s. (Perhaps shotgun experts will explain why this is, even though a woman won the last mixed event.) There are other mixed events -- Sailing, mixed doubles badminton, ice dancing, pairs skating, mixed doubles luge and so on, which are mixed by requiring a fixed number of men and a fixed number of women.

2 years ago, I got so frustrated at Bob Costas blabbing over parts of the Olympic opening ceremonies that clearly were not meant to be blabbed over that I rush ordered a satellite dish to watch the rest of the Olympics on the CBC.

(Besides, you find out there are events at the Olympics in which Americans are not competing for medals!)