Watching The Olympics From Japan

A brief post about watching the Olympics from Japan.

Watching previous Olympics from home, you always knew that you were getting the U.S.-centric perspective from the media, with the the human interest stories about the U.S. athletes and coverage of all the medal ceremonies featuring U.S. athletes. But we just didn't get quite how skewed the coverage can be until now.

It has pretty much been all Judo and Badminton for us. In fact, let's just say that our Olympics watching to date has been pretty much the same as watching a Judo tournament. We aren't even sure whether we even previously knew that Judo was an Olympic sport! We sure do now. See, Judo originated in Japan, and Japan has a number of Olympic Judo hopefuls, including Ryoko Tani (who ended up with a Bronze medal this time around). Since we don't really even understand how Judo is scored, this has been difficult. Jacob loves it though and has been watching with great interest!

Luckily, Mike was able to catch Team USA v. China in basketball the other night. That was fun. Although our three point shooting left much to be desired (until Michael Redd and Deron Williams started connecting in the fourth quarter), the defense and athleticism of Kobe/Dwayne Wade/LeBron was pretty awe-inspiring. Nonetheless, we will have to shoot better against the better teams. During the first half, with China bombing away from three-point land felt a little bit like the NCAA Tournament, where the lesser teams can still take out a big dog by knocking down those threes. That is scary.

We also caught the thrilling 4x100 relay, where the Team U.S.A took gold by hundredths of a second, passing France at the wire to take gold. That was awesome.

So here's to more of that and less um...Judo in the days to come. We shall see.