I love watching the Olympics. Summer or Winter. It's funny. We had a thread similar to this before Vancouver and most people said they didn't care about the Olympics all that much. And that seemed to be a pretty pervasive view when I talked to people in general prior to the Olympics. But it didn't take long for coffee break to be 100% talk about who won what, or the guys wanting to go to the bar to watch them. And it wasn't just the hockey. Hell, the Olympics is the ONLY time I *ever* watch curling.
As for the summer Olympics, the one drawback is that many of the events are too repetitive to be interesting. Like the marathon. They show the guys running. And running some more. And running even more. Bike racing... same thing. Canoe heats are boring as well. And gymnastics, other than uneven bars which is pretty cool, generally doesn't turn my crank. So the events I usually try to find are volleyball (and not the beach volleyball.... if I want to oogle scantily clad women you can find that in almost all corners of the Internet), judo, some tennis, boxing if there is a Canadian contender and wrestling. But the one that surprised me last year... the one that I stayed up to the wee hours of the morning to see... was Simon Whitfield in the triathlon. Again, I see the triathlon as 3 boring events combined into one majorly boring event. However, the drama that came with Whitfield being way, way behind going into the final kilometre only to take the lead just before the finish line until finally giving way to exhaustion and getting silver instead of gold... the whole drama that played out there, giving everything ... I mean EVERYTHING that you have to getting your goal.... I loved it.
I think it will be the same this year. People say they won't watch, it's boring, blah blah blah... but if Canada gets any traction whatsoever I think again it will be all the talk around the water cooler.
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