Saturday, February 27, 2010

I GUESS THE JUDGE SAW SOMETHING THAT WE DIDN'T SEE: A few more Olympic remainders -- a fantastic video by the NYTimes tracking Olympic Pictograms Through the Ages; CNBC's Darren Rovell ranks the 25 Most Marketable Winter Olympians (sadly, it's a slideshow); my favorite winter Olympian's film debut (3:10 in, NSFW); and for evolution of both skating and skater over time, Scott Hamilton's 1984 gold medal long program and Dorothy Hamill, 1976 ("her first difficult jump, a double axel right here.")

We've decided not to Cover-it-Live for the closing ceremonies tomorrow night, though we'll be active in the comments. (CIL will be back for the Oscars, of course.) But I do have this Closing Ceremonies story to tell, because Google has solved a mystery for me -- namely, at the close of the 1980 Summer Games (farewell, Misha!), how did they handle the handover to the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics given the boycott? Was there still a presentation from a California contingent the way Atlanta introduced itself at the end of the Barcelona Games, Sydney at the end of Atlanta and so on?

As it turns out, unsurprisingly no one from Los Angeles was there. President Carter insisted that the IOC not even raise the United States flag in Moscow; instead, the Los Angeles city flag was raised, with IOC chair Lord Killanin urging the "sportsmen of the world to unite in peace before a holocaust descends." Despite the 1984 boycott, holocaust averted -- so far.

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