Remembering When

The 2012 Summer Games in London have begun, and I'm not too cool to watch. I enjoy the Olympics quite a bit, really. You can rely on me writing about them as they go, though I wouldn't get my hopes up about specifics from the events day to day. No, I'm more of an unbalanced George Will: I never have played the sports myself but love chattering on and on about deeper meaning and peripheral societal issues that the games touch on.
I was thinking about how the Olympics serve well to mark time. Setting aside the Winter Games, we are left with an extravaganza that takes place once every four years, and it's indelible enough of a memory each time that you can remember a lot of the circumstances in which each one happened. I can only go back so far myself. For me it starts with the games of Barcelona, but my memories of that are admittedly hazy, as I was just a boy in 1992. I remember the Dream Team well enough, but it more or less ends there.

With  the '96 games in Atlanta, I was rather disappointed to learn that even when the events were happening relatively close to my home in Arizona, they still were never live. I remember there being an awful lot of concern about the bomb that was at the time pinned on Richard Jewel. I remember being awfully interested in the transition of the main stadium to the home field of the Atlanta Braves, and I also remember a local radio station's morning crew recording a parody of the Olympic theme. I thought it was hysterical at the time.

By the time of the Sydney games in 2000, I was in high school. Somehow I remember little of that. I remember better in '04 watching the Athens games here and there during a summer when I drove up to Washington to work at a summer camp. I think I missed an awful lot, but I remember well jokes about Greece's haphazard preparations leading up to the games. It's interesting to think about in light of contemporary economic trouble.

The Beijing games came at a time when I had no television-watching capacity to speak of at home, and I had few friends around. I couldn't get the station to come in on the TV, but did manage to watch a fair amount on my computer. It was strange, because the online stream often lacked any commentary, so you would watch the event in silence. I liked that fine. Commentators seldom add very much, except with sports with which I'm so unfamiliar that I truly can't tell what's happening.

For the current games, it seems that I will not be able to watch much online, as they require you have a cable account with a particular level of service. I don't think we have that. Luckily, I now pull in the television signals much better, so I can at least watch the main channel. I'd like better selection, but I can tolerate what is there. In any event, I have more friends these days, so I can probably manage if there's something awfully good on another channel. Hopefully, reader, you'll likewise have access and enjoy it as much as I hope to.