Olympics VS Commonwealth Games

An absolutely disgraceful display of nastiness is present over at Fox Sports slash news.com.au re the Beijing Olympics. Some people are having a go at two Aussie swimmers who won silver.

Because Australia gets to compete in the Commonwealth Games every 4 years, there are some people who have very high expectations of Aussie athletes. The last Commonwealth Games were held on Australian soil in Melbourne, and we won a total of 221 medals, 84 of those gold. Previous to that, we won 207 total (82 gold) in Manchester in 2002.

We had the best ever medal tally for Australia at the Olympics when we hosted the games in Sydney, and there we won a total of 58 medals – only 16 of those were gold. In 2004 we came home with only 49 medals, 17 of those were gold which was our best ever gold medal tally for an Olympics..

As far as I am concerned just showing up at an Olympic games is a massive achievement. It represents years of training and hard work. Winning a medal regardless of the colour of that medal is something to be incredibly proud of.

The coverage of the games is terrible this year – so Aussie biased, and when the Aussies don’t qualify or get a medal, they barely get another mention. I suspect this is a large part of the problem – the commentators are giving people the wrong idea about what it means to get to the games.

I have managed to catch one entire competition which was the mens 77kg weightlifting. I don’t know if we had anyone from Australia competing, I never saw anyone from here. Even so, I greatly enjoyed watching the competition because I got to see a lot of what was going on and the commentators seemed intelligent and told me a fair bit of the backstory of the people involved.

This was one highlight of a pretty awful coverage otherwise – usually Channel 7 flick from one sport to another often not even returning to the sport you were just getting into, stuff is cut to pieces, it is just bad form. Oh, and enough swimming already. We don’t need to see every single heat of every single race, and please don’t replay one medal win 20 times a day instead of showing us live goings on.

I also did get to see some of the synchronised diving but unfortunately it wasn’t the full competition. I love diving, gymnastics, the synchronised swimming and diving, things like the hammer and the javelin. I wish they would have synchronised weightlifting across some of the classes, that would be cool to see, don’t you think? Especially seeing the various sizes of the different weight classes on the same stage.

I have to say the Chinese are putting on an impressive show! The water cube is wicked with the changing colour LED’s. The opening ceremony was very impressive even though nobody watches that kind of thing. It is a shame about the pollution – I am hopeful this will start them thinking about what they are doing to their environment and how unhealthy it is for the people who live there let alone anyone who would like to visit.

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2 thoughts on “Olympics VS Commonwealth Games

  1. Nobody watches the opening ceremony, that is, except you and as it turned out, me who got sucked into it ;)

    And for crying out loud – the Comm games are, as the Chaser put it, The One Sided Dream, where the US and China aren’t allowed to compete. If some folks don’t like that, get over it and wait for Delhi in 2 years time. ;)

    Of course, the commentary here is (as would be expected) US-biased – I swear that the way the commentators treat other countries (especially, so far, the Aussies in the pool), you’d have sworn they had punched them blind-sided earlier that day…

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