We can watch swimming events, basketball, softball, track, and other sports all the time. This is why I will only follow a handful of sports at the Athens Olympics:
- Badminton – I’ve never seen this live. I can’t wait to see how the pros play it.
- Handball – Apparently the US didn’t qualify a team for this sport. I guess I’m rooting for the Turkish.
- Ping Pong – It’s called Table Tennis at the Olympics. I love Ping Pong and I haven’t seen the Chinese play live. They have changed the rules this year to prevent the Chinese from hiding the ball when they serve. Ping Pong players take towel breaks every few points because they’re sweating so hard. Intense.
- Weightlifting – These guys inspire me to push harder and harder on the bench press. There’s a guy on the US team who can squat 1,000 pounds. I can’t even begin to conceptualize that amount of weight.
I have a feeling these sports may not steal the headlines, so I’ll let you know how we do in these very critical sports. If I left any cool sports off this list let me know.
The Modern Pentathlon!! It’s like an action movie distilled into sport: Shooting, Fencing, Swimming, Riding, and Cross-country running. Wow.
At the Sydney Olympics some friends and I ended up with tickets to about 4 sessions of handball (2 games to a session). We went along mainly out of curiosity as we had no idea what the game was like. The good news is it’s a fast paced exciting game that’s great to see live. They rarely show it on the Olympic TV coverage here but I’ll be staying up late at least once to watch it again.
The other sport I’d recommend which again we bought tickets to in Sydney out of sheer curiosity. Pistol shooting, fencing, swimming, riding and running over a single day. It all builds to an exciting climax where the first four events determine your headstart in the running leg with the overall winner being the first person past the post.
That is of course the modern pentathlon I was talking about but neglected to name. Preview button! We don’t need no stinkin’ Preview!