Every four years, one of the greatest sporting spectacles on planet Earth is held. An event that unites most of the world to compete in peace and harmony even when wars scar the landscape. The Olympic Games which were established by the Greeks in and around 776 BC have brought the world together for centuries. According to legend, it was Heracles who first called the Games
"Olympic" and established the custom of holding them every four years. The Ancient Games featured running events, a pentathlon (consisting of a
jumping event, discus and javelin throws, a foot race, and wrestling),
boxing, wrestling, pankration (a mix of boxing and wrestling) and equestrian events.
Tradition has it that Coroebus, a cook from the city of Elis, was the first Olympic champion. Go figure, a cook was the first Olympic Champion. The Games have been held every 4 years with little interruption. There is a long, long history to the Olympic Games which is much too long to go into here. Go to Wikipedia for a boat load of Olympic history.
The 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin were the first Games to be broadcast on television, though only to local audiences.
These were the famous games when Jesse Owens defeated the Nazi runners which infuriated Adolf Hitler. The 1956 Winter Olympics were the first internationally televised Olympic Games
and the following Winter Games had their broadcasting rights sold for the first time to specialized television broadcasting networks when CBS paid $394,000 for the American rights and the EBU, European Broadcasting Union allocated $660,000.
In the following decades the Olympics became one of the ideological
fronts of the Cold War. Superpowers jockeyed for political supremacy,
and the IOC wanted to take advantage of this heightened interest via the
broadcast medium.
The sale of broadcast rights enabled the IOC to increase the exposure
of the Olympic Games, thereby generating more interest, which in turn
created more appeal to advertisers time on television. This cycle
allowed the IOC to charge ever-increasing fees for those rights. For example, CBS paid $375 million for the rights of the 1998 Nagano Games, while NBC spent $3.5 billion for the broadcast rights of all the Olympic Games from 2000 to 2012.
With the innovation of television and networks paying billions of dollars to broadcast the games, the host cities now feel obligated to put on a spectacle like non other for the Opening Ceremonies. This past Friday, my wife and I rested back into our recliners to watch the show that London, England had put together, a show that cost several million dollars to produce. We love watching the Opening Ceremonies of the Olympic Games as well as many of the events. After about 30 minutes into the Opening Ceremonies, we looked at each other and said, "Are You Freakin' Kidding Me"? What the hell were all those people coming out of the grassy hill? They were like fire ants pouring out of their ant hill. At one point I thought the entire population of London was going to come out of that thing. Then the kicker to what I saw of the ceremonies was the enormous baby doll lying in a bed. It was creepy and I didn't get it? I thought it was going to come alive like the giant Stay Puff Man. Both of us thought the Ceremonies were boring and dull, just like the British themselves. Only the stinking British could use their health care system as a highlight to their storied history. Maybe they should have brought Jack The Ripper in to kill some prostitutes. That would have held my attention. Let me just say neither one of us made it through to the end because boredom won the battle and sleep set in. The next day I sat down and thought I would give it another shot since I dozed off the night before. Again I sat down in the recliner and hit play on the DVR and guess what? I did not make it through again! I saw the freaky big baby and then fell asleep in almost the exact same spot. In fact, I happened to see the kids light the Olympic Flame on a replay during a swimming event. Being a traditionalist, I was disappointed to see that the Limey Bastards did not use and actual cauldron to house the flame. They came up with these weird fangled pod things that rose like alien seed pods in the wind. I still haven't seen Sir Paul McCartney sing at the end. To sum it up, the Opening Ceremonies rated about a 3 out of 10 on the R2G satisfaction scale. Let's hope the rest of the games don't rate as low.
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