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Home Contacts Calendar 10km Series Super Series Blister Results & Ladders Sydney Runs +Maps |
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Home Contacts Calendar 10km Series Super Series Blister Results & Ladders Sydney Runs +Maps |
(1) The Atlanta organisers will take great pains not to emulate the crassness of their Los Angeles compatriots' 84 grand pianos at the 1984 opening ceremony. However, their efforts will fail. The temptation to use 96 or 100 of something (96 because it's 1996, 100 because it's the centenary Games) will be too much for them to resist. Because they are American, it will have to be something BIG (96 howitzers, perhaps? 100 x 50-girl troupes of football cheerleaders in cowboy hats? 96 Stealth bombers would make a tasteful contribution. 100 condominium-sized condoms might highlight the USA's talent for restraint and understatement.)
(2) A Channel 7 commentator will refer to the opening ceremony as "the greatest display in the space-time continuum". This is because it is a condition of such commentators' contracts that they out-hyperbole all their predecessors, and "space-time continuum" is the only term which can now achieve this. People doing this job in Sydney 2000 may be in a bit of strife.
(3) Channel 7 will employ at least one athletics commentator who has extreme difficulty pronouncing the letter "l". Austrayyians wiww be enthrawwed by the feats of briyyiant Itayyians and Braziyyians in Track and Fiewwd on the other side of the worwwd.
(4) Whenever anyone wins anything, the flag of their nation will be handed to them within 30 seconds from the crowd. This will demonstrate the truly friendly non-nationalistic spirit of competition in which the Games are conducted.
(5) If Kathy Freeman wins anything, the flags of both her nations will be handed to her within 30 seconds from the crowd. Freeman herself will confirm that this has nothing to do with politics. She will truly believe this, probably to the end of her days.
(6)Whether Kathy Freeman wins anything or not, some TV journalist who ought to know better will thrust a microphone in her face and ask a question requiring more than a yes/no answer. Freeman will then whinny and neigh her way through a rambling, uninterrupted 3-minute crypto-sentence, peppered with the adolescent punctuation "yunnoy". Apart from learning that she is "stoyked" (sic), listeners will derive little of substance from her ramblings. Since she is a national icon, and therefore beyond criticism, no-one will inform her that the use of well-formed sentences which actually predicate something and contain an identifiable verb might enhance her public's perception of her as an articulate being.
(7) Some TV journalist even more cake-brained than the one mentioned in prediction (6) will thrust a microphone at Kerry Saxby-Junna. The result will be as for (6), only worse. If that's possible.
(8) Channel 7 will refuse to inform Australian viewers of the starting time of any particular event, claiming it is all too hard and that they have to judge it minute by minute. The teaser phrase "coming up soon" will feature prominently in their commentators' vocabulary, especially just before ad breaks. "Soon" will mean, in the context of Olympic coverage, anything from "just after the ad break" to "a fortnight next Tuesday". Viewers who prefer action to waffle will be well advised to run an 8-hour video overnight, every night, and do some judicious zapping the following morning to find the 15 minutes of actual sport.
(9) Swimming commentators will again dazzle us with their ability to trim superfluous syllables. Examples for the uninitiated are fly for butterfly, free for freestyle, swim for swimming, meet for meeting, swim meet for, well, something. Get it? Just drop an unnecess syllab or two from all those nasty inconven long words. It's not diff, once you get accust to it, and it does econ beautly on your prec and valuab time.
(10) The women's 5000 and 10000 metres will be ignored, trivialised or brutally fragmented, since viewers will be regarded as having the attention span of a gnat. Channel 7's confidence in our attention span will be magically restored for the screening of the men's 5000 and 10000, which will be shown in their entirety, ad-free.
(11) Within 2 days of the opening ceremony, the phrase "just another day at the office", referring to the ease of some champion's victory, will have been used at least 18 times.
(12) Commentators on the men's marathon will fail to do their homework and will be unable to identify the nationality of at least 3 African runners from their well-known, internationally recognised 3-letter abbreviation. This failure will be the cause of much merriment and jocularity in the commentary box, instead of the apologies and attempts at rectification one might reasonably expect.
(13) If an Australian is heard to be within cooee of finishing 18th in anything, coverage of a non-Australian breaking a world record will be interrupted. Any Australian finishing better than 18th in anything will be described as a "Great Australian" and will receive a ticker-tape parade on arriving home. Coverage of any British athlete winning a medal will suddenly be interrupted by "technical difficulties with the satellite".
(14) The synchronised swimmers will continue to smile inanely, even at breakfast in the Olympic village canteen.
(15) The only member of the Clinton household not to feature prominently at both opening and closing ceremonies will be Socks The Cat. And even that will be touch and go.
(16) Despite all of the above, I will once again watch every minute of the second greatest show on earth and feel like a wrung-out dishrag at the end of the fortnight. Second greatest? Oh, sorry. Didn't I mention that odd-numbered years have only one real function - to keep Olympic Years and Soccer World Cup years apart.
