kottke.org posts about Olympic Games
Two average Joes compete in five Olympic events to see how they stack up against the top Olympic competitors.
Dennis Crowley and myself spent all day doing 5 different Olympic Events: 100m freestyle, 100m dash, 110m hurdles, long jump and the rings (in gymnastics) and compared ourselves to Olympic athletes.
Olympic athletes make it look easy and these two make it look difficult. I particularly enjoyed Crowley’s 100-meter swim/walk. Related: can you go from normal guy to Olympian with a few years of hard training? (via clusterflock)
Update: ESPN followed Kathryn Bertine — “an average person with an athletic background” — on her two-year quest to become an Olympic athlete. (thx gerard)
Update: The Mechanical Olympics project is leveraging the Amazon Mechanical Turk workforce to make videos of ordinary people competing in all the Olympic events. Here’s an example video. (thx, michael)
The folks behind the excellent Baseball Reference have launched a statistics site for the Olympics. Every athlete that’s ever competed in the Games has his/her own page. Announcement here.
A rare positive review from Speak Up of the new London 2012 that everyone else in the world seems to hate. “I believe, despite any ensuing boo’s, that this is some of the most innovative and daring identity work we have seen in this new millennium, and the lack of cheesy and imagination-impairing gradients gives me hope that identity work can still be resurrected on a larger scale.”
Update: Coudal loves the logo.
Jonathan Crowe ran an Olympics-themed weblog for Athens 2004 and Torino 2006. Interestingly, the 2004 version got a lot more traffic, but more recent one made him more money via Google AdSense. “Whether [the increase is] due to better ad block positioning, ‘better’ ads (more on-target or more lucrative), a ‘better’ audience, or simply a more mature advertising network, I have no idea.”
I’ve got a few stories about the Winter Olympics open in tabs, so in the interest of getting rid of them:
- Photographer Vincent Laforet discusses his process in getting the photographs he wants.
- How the broadcast graphics were done for NBC’s coverage of the Olympics.
- The Nation on what went wrong with NBC’s coverage.
- Here’s the New Yorker’s take on the TV coverage.
Finally, Gelf Magazine compares Olympic predictions with the actual results. The media outlets surveyed all predicted higher medal counts for the US, but weren’t off by that much (aside from the ridiculous AP predicitons). Only NBC and Nike were surprised that Bode Miller sucked so royally.
Russia plans to drive a golf ball off of the ISS with a gold-plated, scandium alloy six-iron into a four-year, low-earth orbit….which may actually damage the space station if the ball is not “hit out of the station’s orbital plane”. I understand this event will be debuting at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
Olympic snowboarders competed while listening to their iPods. The goal? Effortless concentration. “It enables you to focus on what you’re doing without actually focusing, if that makes any sense. You’re not over-thinking, and that’s the best way to perform the harder tricks and maneuvers.”
A collection of “stupid nude calendars”. I confess that I found this while looking for photos from the racy curling calendar…but I came away empty-handed. (Only slightly NSFW.)
Larry Brown wanted Stephon Marbury off the Olympic team in Athens. Marbury is the most overrated player in the NBA…there ain’t no “Marbury” in “team”. I wouldn’t have him on my team even if he played for free.
NYC2012 is using the Union Square clock art work to promote NY’s 2012 Olympic bid. One of the artists who did the piece is not thrilled about it being used for advertising.
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