reader mail about the Olympics

A reader inquires:

“I don’t know why I’m mentioning this, but you didn’t mention the Olympics once on your blog, not necessarily expectable on the basis of your sporty personality. Why? Just too busy in party central?!”

Sheer coincidence. The 2012 Summer Olympics, running from July 27-August 12, coincided almost to the day with my Brazil lecture trip from July 28-August 13.

And that meant that I had almost no time whatsoever to watch the Olympics this year. On trips like this, it’s not as if you’re just giving a lecture for an hour every third day and then are free. You want to listen to the other lecturers. There are usually social obligations, and indeed most conference organizers (the ones in Brazil in particular) are very generous in the dinners and tours they arrange.

The upshot was that I didn’t see a single Olympic event until yesterday’s Brazil victory for the gold medal over the USA in women’s volleyball. And even that was only because I happened to be invited to lunch at a Curitiba home where the match happened to be on.

Then I caught a bit of Russia’s men’s volleyball win over Brazil. And part of the first half of the USA over Spain in men’s basketball, though I missed the second half due to my flight back to São Paulo.

I’m a huge NBA fan, but not a fan of recent U.S. Olympic men’s basketball teams. Whenever I watch them, the conventional critique seems to be right: lots of individual stars not playing effectively as a team, and a bit awkward when playing by international rules. Spain frankly looked more impressive in the part of the final that I saw today. The U.S. is simply fortunate to have some incredible athletes on that team.

Also, credit where credit is due: I was expecting the London Olympics to be a catastrophe, and they were not. Between missiles on rooftops and security company breakdowns, it looked like this was going to be the biggest embarrassment for the UK in decades (Mitt Romney was rude and clumsy to say so, but many people were quietly thinking so). But from what I could tell through my ultra-casual following of the event, it seems to have come across very nicely. Well done, London.