http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jij1CscGxkY

Closing ceremonies:
Something sad, like an old fop failing to hit the mark, as when you see Annie Lennox trying to act transgressive. She walks the stage breathing hard, then slides to her knees, has to use the back of a dancer for support getting up as her creaky old knees and quads were not up to task.

The Games themselves:
Junkie here. Eyeballs glued to NBCOlympics for daily fix. Watched stuff like canoe racing, outside distance swimming, field hockey like it's supposed to be (in the US it's a girl's high school sport), women's Freestyle wrestling, aside from the obligatory swimming, diving, Track and Field (Women's pole vault for some reason stirs my hormones), etc.

The aftermath:
Now watching reruns of the stuff I missed but the thrill is just not the same as the first highs. Like a true junkie.

kingstonian - you are lucky to be spared the crap we are getting here about "lack of gold" -please for more taxpayers money to cosset sports people etc etc

From 'The Independent' -


No one, however, seems to have a problem with the docility and hysteria uniting millions of ordinary people in a Great Big Lie. For their obedient infatuation with the Games, at the behest of the mass media, has become a chilling exercise in the fragility of democracy.
Here is the bald truth suppressed at the heart of our present euphoria. In most cases you could stage exactly the same events as "world championships", last year or next, and hardly anyone would cross the road to watch. Very few, in fact, would bother to shift a thumb on the television remote. Jessica Ennis herself completed her Olympics warm-up before 300 paying customers.
Now clearly the Games mean more than a world championship to many of the participants themselves, albeit not in mainstream sports such as football or tennis. And that warrants respect. But only up to a point. Because it's blatantly dishonest to dismiss all these people as nobodies one day, and acclaim them as "icons" the next; to exalt, overnight, minority pastimes you have long considered dull or ludicrous; to deny that many of them, contested by so few people, must almost certainly set the Olympic bar pretty low.
Which is presumably why so much Lottery revenue was given to sports with a financially intimidating infrastructure. Sure enough, one of our rowing gold medallists had never sat in a boat until picked out by a Lottery-funded scheme barely four years ago. I certainly wouldn't disparage her endeavours or achievements since.
She is, demonstrably, extremely talented – and, like almost all the athletes I encountered at Eton Dorney, an impressive role model for young compatriots. Certainly, if the world is deceived that all Britons are as accomplished and engaging as Anna Watkins and Katherine Grainger, then the flattery contrived by these Games will have been worth every penny.
So I would hardly equate the syndrome with the Nuremberg rallies. What's the harm, after all, in people getting a little overexcited about something as wholesome as sport, of any kind? Over the last 14 days, we have duly come to respect the dedication required by champions of any discipline; and found their emotions agreeably infectious. But their crass apotheosis, by a free press that would have disgraced Pravda under Brezhnev, frightens the life out of me.
Because it shows how much judgement we are prepared to suspend, to feel part of the show. We see the state broadcaster devote more than half a bulletin to "another silver medal for Team GB", before a desultory look at carnage in the world's most ancient cities. And the next morning we get on the train and boast how we've got tickets to "the" beach volleyball, or ask if you caught "the" handball last night.
It's what Guy Lebord called "the society of the spectacle" – the decline from being, to having, to appearing. And we are so enslaved to the illusion that you have to wonder whether people would be equally receptive to less innocuous agendas. As it is, flag-waving slobs merely wobble through their schedule of bread (or Big Macs) and circuses, wearing "Team GB" merchandise that counsels: "Better Never Stops".
Will we resist the same intellectual degradation, if it ever proposes political sickness rather than physical health? Many Britons are sticking their chests out, exulting in the rediscovery of national pride. But you have to pray that any new vanity will never supplant the wry, seasoned perspectives so celebrated in the ceremony that opened the whole spectacle. Because if better never stops, neither does worse.

^ Too much overt propaganda to look for anything subliminal.

^ Leni Riefenstahl's stuff was far better produced. The opening and closing crap is not going to be watched in the future like 'Triumph of the Will'.

There are parallels with the public displays of grief for the likes of Lady Diana that the media helped to whip up.

NJS-
I like to Platonically contemplate your idea of sport being man vs odds or nature, and indeed see the value of your proposition.

But nothing gets my adrenaline rushing like like the vile and base rush of beating a fellow human in sport. UMMMMM YUMMMMMY, Deeeelishus.
And I like watching it too. Like a gourmand, not a gourmet. So for 2 weeks there I was in "docile and hysteric", fully manipulated by the powers that be(hallowed be their names), pig in mud decadent ignorant of all important and sober issues heaven. And I loved it and I want more. Almost forgot women wrestling oh-oh-oh yeahhhh!

HOWZAT!!!!

Boppy, any decent research shows that the effect of watching the Oilympics on promoting activity is about 2/5th of SFA or a bit less.

You'll have to get me that research fxh, i'm going from mine and my friends observations we all ride or jog and have noticed a lot more people out since the games started, also would you believe our village now has a jogging group, i had about 30 middle, and older age people stampede down my round last night, i have to say i was quite proud of it, people about effecting positive change.