After watching the spectacular opening ceremonies, the fantastic Olympic competitions and now the equally spectacular closing ceremonies, THAT statement will take on a totally different meaning to me. The display of technology, skill, talent, culture and discipline was, to say the least, awesome. They sure know how to impress the world community. How can Great Britain possibly top THIS ONE in 2012? I wish them well and I hope I’m around to see.
My congratulations to all the competitors and especially those representing the UNITED STATES , winners and not. They are awesome ambassadors and for that, they ALL are WINNERS.
Hosting the Olympics is a daunting task. I think that China did a great job! I am not as impressed by the individual sporting events, as I am by the good sportsmanship that has been shown. All the athletes treating each other like brothers and sisters, that is what the Olympics is all about. The final men’s BB game against Spain, was pretty good!
Doug
I had a hard time enjoying the Olympics. The opening and closing ceremonies were tributes to what you can do when paying sub-poverty wages. In my mind, even with all the glitz, I couldn’t forget that China is the country where you get locked up for speaking your mind. I’m sure all the Tibetan monks that were killed a few months back wouldn’t be impressed by the ceremonies either.
I heard GB will not try to top China at least they will have another approach. The Olympic games now were surely impressive in most every way. I heard that they even emphasized on having the accommodations for the competitors the best ever. Usually at previous OG the accommodations for the spectators and press was better than for the competitors! Or so I am told. So bravo for China! The only thing staining the OG now is how protestants got treated they could have handled that better. The competitors are all winners as you say. I have to mention the Icelandic handball team(modern team handball is more than a century old sport quite popular in quite a lot of countries but for some strange reason it is not popular in any English speaking country). Iceland played for gold against France but lost. Iceland is therefore the smallest nation to reach the finals in any team sport. The population in January was a whopping 313,000! To reach the finals Iceland’s team had to beat several multimillion nations like Russia (multiple World-, European- and Olympic champions), Germany (current World Champions), Poland, Spain and draw against Denmark (the current European Champions). So we are naturally very proud of our guys.
Even though I am proud of all the Icelandic competitors and admire all the other ones from around the world I really must take my hat off for the micro-nation of Tuvalu. Some of you may know about these Pacific islands with a population of less than 12,000 because they are vanishing due to rising sea levels. They had 3 competitors in the OG how awesome and impressing is that? I am not familiar with in what sports they were competing but my best guess would be swimming. The competitors from Tuvalu must be the biggest of all big winners in the Summer Olympics of 2008.
