Compared to some others, our family really isn’t into sports that much. A year ago, our daughter was married into a wonderful family of sports fans. They know the teams that they follow and they enjoy going to a lot of games each year. Tickets for baseball and football games are a part of their budget and time to go to the stadiums and watch is a priority. Adding people to your family always involves learning new things and one of the things I have had to learn is to check on sports more often so that I can keep up with intelligent conversation. You can ask either of our kids, our family just found other things to do than to watch sports. We usually knew who was playing in the World Series or the Super Bowl. We sometimes followed a favorite team in the NBA or college basketball finals. We encouraged our children to be active and to participate in lots of activities, but organized sports never became a big focus of our family.

Still, I love the Olympics. I think that part of what I enjoy is that there are so many events in such a small amount of time. The sports played in the Olympics are so diverse. In Rapid City, canoeing, kayaking and rowing are things that a quirky few of us do. Most of our neighbors find the fact that I have a garage full of boats to be an expression of eccentricity. But these are Olympic sports and I can watch a lot of people doing these activities. And this year, with the games in England, the rowing events are taking place on a river where people have been rowing for more than a thousand years – there is a lot of tradition surrounding that sport on the Thames.

At the same time, there are sports like Taekwondo, that don’t get a lot of media hype. Paige McPherson, from Sturgis, our famous neighbor city, is one of only two women who will compete for the U.S. in taekwondo in the London Olympics this year. Unlike wrestling and boxing and other traditional fighting sports, in taekwondo, the competitors face people in different weight classes instead of just ones who are of a similar size.

Field hockey, rugby, handball, badminton, triathlon, weightlifting, and even table tennis make the list. A few years ago, I met one of the coaches of the U.S. table tennis Olympic team. There are people who really take ping-pong seriously. And they have amazing skills. Archery combines a need for both physical and mental strength. And keen vision is key to the sport. The list of sports is amazing. There is something for everyone.

And London is a great place to host the Olympics. The British are going to great lengths to show of their island. We were at a wedding and didn’t watch the opening ceremonies, but reading about them this morning reveals how unique the ceremonies were. It is a significant challenge to do something new in a gigantic stadium. Parades, drums and fireworks are standard fare. Bright lights and new music are expected. Welcoming the world to your home, telling a bit about who you are is a big challenge when most of the people will be watching an event on television that has to play well to a massive audience in a sports stadium.

The British wanted to make sure that the world got a taste not only of their history and culture - they couldn’t help showing off a bit of that droll sense of humor for which we all love them. Who would have thought that the queen would have gone for a pretend entrance by parachute? When the U.S. hosts the games, we don’t spend time in the ceremonies telling stories of industrial pollution, labor unrest, the losses of war, children’s hospitals or other things that we might call “ugly.” The Brits were up for telling the whole, unvarnished story. They had sheep and geese, children and adults, smokestacks and fiction. A whole bunch of Mary Poppins banished Voldemort. Yellow submarines celebrated British contributions to popular music.

The ceremony began with a quote from Shakespeare: “Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises.” The show ended with wild cheers and more than a few people scratching their heads in amazement at what they had just seen, wondering how it all fit together.

We won’t soon forget that show.

Of course the queen made her real appearance, as well as the actress who descended by parachute. Her father had opened the 1948 games. Her grandfather was there when the 1908 games began. It is a once-in-a-lifetime experience even for a reigning monarch.

These games are different from those of previous generations. We often think of those differences by listing the new events. This is the first Olympics to feature women’s boxing, for example. But there are also sports that used to be part of the games that are no longer considered to be Olympic. When the queen’s father and grandfather opened the games, music, painting, architecture and poetry were all on the roster. The Olympic tradition celebrates the mind as well as the body. The original Greek games expected the athletes to be well rounded - as able to make a stirring speech as run a fast race. Poetry was dropped as an Olympic sport after the 1948 London games. I don’t know if it was because the audiences got bored or because poets are just not naturally competitive. Maybe if the members of the I.O.C. went to a modern poetry slam in Chicago or San Francisco, they’d reconsider.

Looking back, some of the Olympic poetry winners weren’t much as poets. The 1912 winner wrote in part: “O Sport, you Beauty! . . . O Sport, you are Justice! . . . O Sport, you are Happiness! The body trembles in bliss upon hearing your call . . .” Words like that could make one want to re-think your love of poetry. It falls quite short of the Greek poetic tradition. In Homer’s Illiad, Achilles says,

“I too shall lie in the dust when I am dead.
But now let me win noble renown.”

The eyes of the world will be upon London for the next two weeks. I, for one, am expecting the closing ceremonies, like the opening, to feature more than a bit of poetry. It is, after all, Britain.

Copyright © 2012 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.