Public Address - Field Theory (Home)

Disclaimer Day | Aug 13, 2008 11:40

I've been here a few days already and I haven't really introduced myself. Hi, I'm Hadyn. Please note the spelling.

You've may have seen me around the traps (by which I mean the internet) at my other blogs:

• Grabthar's Hammer
• The Wellingtonista
• The Dropkicks, which is also a podcast

You may have even read my stuff here during the rugby world cup.

I also have a couple of "creative" blogs: The Adventures of Hadyn Green and The Blog of the Bat. The latter got me down a little when I realised that me pretending to be Batman was getting more readers than any of my other stuff.

I have written the occasional (one) screenplay that has gained international kudos.

My partner is the co-creator of the PrettyPrettyPretty beauty blog that seems to be all the rage with the laydeez.

And finally I work for "the man". I'm living in Wellington, so that should've given you a clue. As such, here is my legally required disclaimer:

Views or opinions expressed in this blog and in the subsequent discussion forums are not necessarily endorsed by the Ministry of Education, and their publication via the blog and forum must not be taken as an endorsement of any kind.

Got that? Besides, I'm here to talk sport not education. Expressions like "taken to school" notwithstanding

With this out of the way I'll get back to the Olympics later today.

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Did you see that? | Aug 12, 2008 11:30

Last time I extolled the wonders of the future. The vast and seemingly unending array of images available to view from the quadrennial sporting spectacular that is the Olympics. Well, if you can consider four to be a seemingly unending number.

I tried again to access NBC's footage (through nefarious means) but was still shown the "we're sorry but we can't show you this if you're not from America" message.

"Why not!" I bellowed across my lounge, scaring the cat. Well the answer is simple, as I have been told by my friend in broadcasting:

It's IOC rules that mean the video won't work overseas. Basically, when you sign up for the rights, you agree that nothing you broadcast will be accessible overseas. Because then they make less money selling the rights to other countries

And I suppose that makes sense. If you go to the games homepage on the left there is a dropdown box to watch the videos. If you pick New Zealand it opens up the TVNZ live feeds. If you pick Belgium it takes you to Eurovision Sports. If you pick Oman it takes you to YouTube.

The Olympic website has a list of the events that are on at any time. If you see that TVNZ is showing replays of badminton men's' singles heats between Taiwan and Malaysia instead of, say, the women's weightlifting finals then I think you've got every right to complain. Or any time any one of the four channels is showing nothing, then also complain. There's a lot of sport going on, show us replays if you have to but we want to see it all!

But when we do get to see the events, my goodness, don't they look good!? I could watch those underwater tracking shots of Michael Phelps, with the Water Cube's bubbly roof above him, for ages.

In fact there are a lot of great shots at the pool and plenty of slow-mo cameras. My favourite camera though, is that camera on a wire that flies over the rowers. It's fantastic! The first time I saw it I had to take a second to figure out what was going on, after all this wasn't some guy on a motorbike like the cycling. The last time I asked the "how'd they do that" question was when I was watching the Superbowl a few years back and in the replays they were able to freeze the action and rotate around the player, just like the Matrix. The people I was watching the game with said: "What? It's just tv". To which I responded: "No, it's live sport, and that is amazing."

And I still love that world-record green line zooming along the pool, and the country names on the lanes (in the rowing too).

Other cool shots I've seen so far include the various angles on the synchronised diving and the behind-target shot of the archery (OMG they're shooting right at me!). But the swimming seems to have the most cameras, including the one on the arm that catches the swimmer in lane five turning at the 50m mark and always looks like it'll be in the way for the swimmer in lane four.

I'm not sure what the high-definition shots are going to show once we get to the men's sprinting, but the New Zealand women's hockey team were made to wear their light-blue alternates because games officials were worried that their white tops would become see-though in the rain (and yet for some reason the beach volleyball girls still have to wear bikinis).

By the way, it's nice to know I'm not the only one who is jonesing for the footage. My friend Mike emailed to say:

Haven't been to bed before 1am the last four nights! I'm tired, but I'm lovin' it!

Actual sport notes: The swimming is really exciting at the moment, almost every race breaks the world record --- I pick the Cubans to meet the Italians in the finals of the Women's Volleyball --- The Fencing uniforms comments of my last post) wires for fencers have been around for a while. They still have the shorts with the high socks though. I just wish the suits had some kind of lights in them to show where the strike was, it's a bloody tough sport for spectators. --- My yachting enthusiast friend was annoyed that there was no coverage of the yachting. She lamented yesterday that we wouldn't see any until Barbara Kendall started. Lo! And Behold! Barbara did sail and the television goblins showed us yachting footage. --- Some yachting coverage can also be found on the net at Maria Isabel Moreno has become the first athlete of the games found to be using performance enhancing drugs (although the test was two weeks before the games began and she was not I medal contention) --- With everyone plugged into the Olympics is anyone feeling a little bit sorry for Tasman and Northland? I'm not. --- Finally, I don't want to offend anyone in just my second post, but, badminton may just be the most boring sport to be played at high speed.

UPDATE: links fixed, sorry for that.

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Out of the Blocks | Aug 11, 2008 15:42

I am a huge Olympic fan.

I was watching the Daily Show the other night (via the free full episodes they stream) and John Stewart totally stole the joke I was going to use to open my Olympic postings:

"Are you ready to catch Olympic fever? Actually it doesn't have to be the Olympics for you catch it. Seriously, stay away from their pigs and birds"

Naturally he said it better than I could.

During the Sydney games I parked myself in Shadows (the student pub at Auckland Uni) and drank and watched the games for most of the day (the parts where I didn't have lectures, obviously).

During the Athens games I watched everything I could, but was annoyed that I couldn't pull down more information.

Now, here we are in 2008. The Future.

This weekend I had the TV going with TVNZ's coverage of the women's hockey, my laptop streaming men's gymnastics, Amy's laptop streaming weightlifting. I felt like some kind of super villain sitting in his control booth. But like any super villain, I wanted more, more! MORE!

I checked NBC.com to see if I could somehow get some of the feeds they were advertising. However, even after downloading Microsoft's Silverstream, pretending to live in the States (you're all invited to my house in LA to watch my DIRECT TV Cable) the video wouldn't play.

Even the TVNZ feeds won't play if you're overseas.

I understand the television market stuff, but it does seem to screw ex-pats. And what about our troops stationed overseas? Surely we're all doing it for them?

Before the games started there were a lot of people asking about whether or not China should have been awarded the Olympics based on their human rights record. I'm not going to defend China on this, but what would we be complaining about if any of the other countries who bid for the 2008 games got their wish?

First of all finding a country's record on human rights is not the easiest of things. So I defaulted to Amnesty International's descriptions.

Japan put in a bid for Osaka. They would've been slammed on war crimes or the covering up of said crimes, the role of women in their society, but mainly for the whaling.

France put in a bid for Paris. Ummm, they're bad to immigrants, but I'm sure it'll be the nuclear tests that'll bite them in the ass.

Turkey put in a bid for Istanbul. Wow, imagine the uproar if this went ahead.

But the runner-up to host the 2008 summer Olympics was… Canada (Toronto). Canada is just so damn nice. It's the antithesis of China. Even Amnesty International only really calls them up on the fact that the police use tasers and they are a bit mean to indigenous people. But they just so damn nice, eh.

So perhaps when the venue was being selected human rights wasn't at the top of the voters' agenda.

There also seems to be some local anger towards the Olympics or perhaps a chance to highlight issues. Or at least that's how I'm interpreting the two attacks (that we know of) on foreigners. A TVNZ commentator was attacked with a broken chair and suffered minor injuries and then a man and his wife (with links to the the American volleyball coach and New Zealand) were stabbed by a man who then jumped to his own death. Will a death at the hands of a Chinese "radical" draw attention to the plight of the average Chinese person or be more a reason for the police to crack down on the population?

So while the debate about human rights seems to have died away now that the competition has started, it can still be felt bubbling under the surface.

It should be pointed out that there were five other teams who did not make the final round: Bangkok; Cairo; Havana; Kuala Lumpur; and Seville. Wouldn't the Havana games have been fantastic?

**************

Here is the list of sports I managed to watch this weekend in my control booth.

• Weightlifting (women's two categories)
• Cycling road race (men's and women's)
• Archery (women's team)
• Artistic gymnastics (men's and women's team)
• Men's and women's swimming heats and final's (400m individual medley, 100m breaststroke)
• Women's hockey
• Basketball (men's and women's)
• Handball (women's)
• Soccer (men's and women's)
• Equestrian (dressage)
• Synchronised diving (women's 3m springboard)
• Boxing
• Rowing

That's not a bragging list by the way more of a stock take.

During the New Zealand women's hockey match against the Japanese (which was fantastic by the way), Jaimee Claxton, was wearing a makeshift armband that said: "4 Dad". Does anyone know why?

***************

The one thing that's been driving me batty is the commentators complaining about everything, especially the weather. It's too hot, it's rainy, too humid, too hot, too misty, too smoggy, too everything.

During the hockey one commentator complained that:

before I came to Beijing I was told that it would rain twice a week. Well I've been here [a week] and this is the first time it's rained!

Yes, he was complaining that his weather rule of thumb wasn't working.

During two different sports I have heard commentators say that while it may look clear on the television, visibility is actually really poor. And to be fair it was quite bad at the rowing, where from the start you couldn't see the finish. Lucky they travel backwards in a straight line then.

Then were ones (and it was plural) who complained about the "mist, haze and smog, though it's hard to tell which is which". So there may actually be no smog then? Not if you're talking to Pete Montgomery (bless his overactive mouth).

Maybe the commentators should just toughen up a little. Maybe they should think about the athletes who usually have travel from really hot countries to "colder" ones for the Olympics.

But it is interesting to point out that despite the "athletes will suffer because of the conditions" rhetoric, world records have still been broken. One of those records was broken in the driving range on the archery range by the Italian team (and possibly again by the South Koreans). And I just watched the American's smash another in the pool now (I'll post about Mr Phelps later on).

And the rain wasn't the only thing the archers had to put up with. In between rounds the sound system blasted out bad Chinese pop music. At least the Swimmers got to listen to faux-rock.

The only athletes so far whose complaints I shall indulge are the dressage riders (and horses). Why did they have to wear the full get-up in that heat? Where are the Nike light-weight sports top hats?

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