"Head...Shoulders...Knees and...SOCKS!"

Ahh…the Olympics. For some reason, every four years, I find myself getting sucked in to watching sports that I don’t normally watch during the off years. Swimming, diving, track and field events, rowing, weight lifting, heck…back in college…I even watched the NBC late night coverage of boxing. And I hate boxing.

The other thing that I love is the opening and closing ceremonies. The pageantry of the opening ceremonies – the national costumes (You go American Samoa!) and snappy matching suits (Brazil in particular was looking rather snazzy this year!) are fun. Go Liechtenstein with your one athlete! And have you ever heard of the country of Nauru?

The closing ceremonies are just a big party. Everything is over, and everyone is just there to have a good time. Spouse (who was known as Boyfriend at the time) and I went down to Atlanta for the 1996 Summer games. While we had applied for tickets to a bunch of events, the only thing we got tickets for were the closing ceremonies. The day before we were set to fly down, I started to feel under the weather. Little did we know at the time, but when I got back home I was diagnosed with Mono which knocked me out something awful and it was about four months before I was well enough to go back to work full time.

But illness be damned! We had a great time. Hanging out in a post-bombing Centennial Olympic park, actually waiting in line to get into Bud World, and watching Boyfriend hack into the operating system at the ATT pavilion so that he could check his email. But the Closing Ceremonies were just a huge frigging party – lots of drunken athletes running up and down on to the stage, throwing around props, dancing around, and just having a good time. We bonded with some of the Dutch athletes, sang songs on the Marta train, and were wiped out by the time we got home.

So some of my Olympic fever may have to do with the fact that I am a chick who likes to watch sports. (Watch – not necessarily participate). The feel good human interest stories, the artistry of some of the events, the marvel at what people put themselves through to achieve a life long goal. And maybe …just a little bit…Bob Costas.

A sad note though – An Iranian wrestler may be withdrawing from the Games rather than wrestle against an Israeli athlete whose name he drew for competition. This seems to me, to go against the very core nature of the games – for people to come together from around the world to compete without the meddling of world politics and meet and befriend others who they normally would never have the opportunity to get to know otherwise. But I, like the rest of the world will just sit back and watch the event unfold for the next two weeks, and hope that the worst thing that occurs is that Michael Phelps doesn’t break Mark Spitz’s medal record.