So, like millions of others, I too have a certain obsessive fascination with the Olympics, although my specific level of involvement changes with each one; some years, I barely manage to watch even the opening ceremonies and a handful of actual games, while other years I tend to be riveted to every moment, burning hours upon hours of my life in the afternoons and in the middle of the night on the kinds of bizarre, obscure events I seemingly only pay attention to once every four years. And when it comes to the Beijing Games here in 2008, I have to admit that it's been the latter for me; I've been mesmerized by the events this year, in fact, in a way I simply haven't with any of the other Olympics of my life. (And for those who are curious, by the way, my first conscious Olympics memories are of the '76 Games in Montreal, from when I was seven years old; in fact, I have a very clear memory of watching Nadia Comaneci score her perfect 10 that year.)

I've been spending some time in the last two weeks thinking about all this, about why I seem to be responding to the Beijing Games in such a passionate way, and I realized that it's actually for a whole number of small yet fascinating reasons; and since tomorrow's actually the close of this year's Games, I thought it was time for me to sit down and finally write about it all, because I imagine that a lot of other people are going through the same experience as me this particular year. For example, one of the biggest things for me is what I was mentioning in my last update here; these are the first Olympics I've ever watched on a high-definition television, something that's also the case with tens of millions of other Americans this particular year, because of the US's broadcast-television industry finally switching over to a digital format in just five months from now. And man, what a difference HD makes, I'm fuckin' telling ya! I imagine this is just still the newness of it all, of course, of just the stunning jump in quality that is made between standard-def analog and high-def digital television; but for right now in my life, I have to admit that I'm a bit of an HD junkie, and will watch just about anything in that format that any schmuck wants to pump into my home. (Why, just ask me how addicted I am to the local PBS station's 24-hour all-HD digital channel these days, even when it's just crap like volcano documentaries and sixty minutes of "Look! Pretty flowers!")

There's something simply unreal about watching the Olympics in high-def, like perhaps a science-fiction novel has sprung to life in front of my eyes and my brain simply refuses to accept what it's looking at; it's unreal to sit a couple of feet away from my monitor, realize that the bright and colorful events that I am watching are happening live as we speak, halfway across the planet, that I can see the individual hairs on athletes' arms, see the individual faces of the crowd when displaying a sweeping view of thousands of them. I know this sounds silly, but I keep imagining that I could simply step through the screen like a bad fantastical movie; I keep pushing my fingers against the plasma screen, in fact, wondering each time why my hand doesn't just pass through and suddenly show up on one of the several thousand expensive NBC high-def digital cameras they currently have over there.

Oh, and speaking of which, did you know that NBC has several thousand expensive high-def digital cameras over in Beijing right now? Because that gets me to the second big reason why I'm so obsessed with the Beijing Games in particular; because believe it or not, NBC is actually filming and broadcasting over 3,100 freaking hours of Olympics coverage this year, every single minute of which can be watched completely for free by any American at the NBC website, online and in a streaming format. ZOW! This is nothing new, of course, NBC's hunger for trying to bring extended coverage of the Games to American homes, in sometimes very forward-thinking and even occasionally outright experimental ways; for example, back during the '92 Games in Barcelona, a bunch of my friends and I actually kicked in to a big pool so that one particularly popular house full of slackers could order NBC's "Triplecast" coverage, basically three pay-per-view stations on cable right when pay-per-view first became technically feasible, where for a mere $170 flat fee you too could suddenly have televised access to hundreds of additional hours of event coverage besides what was being shown on broadcast and cable.

Of course, let's not forget that NBC lost millions on their Barcelona pay-per-view experiment (in fact, some estimate that they might've lost as much as $100 million -- NBC has never officially said); and that's why I applaud them so much for simply sticking all these thousands of hours of coverage up for free at the website this time, because I bet there were a bunch of executives within the company arguing that they should charge an outrageous subscription fee instead, and try their little '92 monetization experiment again to perhaps better results this time. Because that's the important thing to understand about this web coverage, is that a tremendous amount of it has actually been live over the last two weeks; and since Beijing is exactly 12 hours away from New York, this has made live events ironically easy to follow here in America this year, with their evening events happening in our mornings and their morning events in our evenings.

Essentially, it's been letting me watch the Olympics this year in the spirit that I've always wanted to watch the Olympics, in a way that I simply thought I would eventually have to attend an Olympics myself to actually do; that is, being a non-sports guy myself, it's not the actual sports that gets me so excited about the Olympics, not the thrill of waiting to see who won this event or that, of which horse-faced frat-boy swimmer won eight gold medals or whatever the fuck. No, no, I get excited about the Olympics for the same reason Pierre Frédy got excited, the French nobleman who singlehandedly founded the modern Olympic Games in 1894; I get excited because of what the Olympics says about humanity, about what it means symbolically for all of us as a global culture. (And psst, by the way, here's a random Wikipedia fact, that the founding of the modern Olympics is actually a bit more complicated than simply Frédy standing up one day and saying, "Let's put on a show;" turns out that high-minded Victorians had been staging athletic events since the 1850s being trumpeted as "modern Olympics," simply that Frédy was the first to organize a legitimately international committee to run such a thing, and raise a legitimately large amount of international support and money.)

I love the Olympics for the same reason stated in the official Olympic Creed, as defined by the governing international committee: "The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well." Wow, how great, right? That's why I make sure to watch at least some of the Olympics every single time they're held; not to watch a bunch of spoiled Americans who are already pros devour up gold medals so they can add them to their multi-million-dollar Nike endorsements, but to watch the legitimate thrill of amateur athletes compete in pretty much the only event from their sport that actually matters. That's why I'm addicted to all the most obscure events of every Olympics, the archery and the weightlifting and the sculling and all the other stuff that barely ever gets any notice or coverage outside of the Olympics itself; these are the places within the Games where you see people competing purely for the love of the game, purely for the athleticism, purely as the IOC says to simply have an excuse to be there, to participate. This is why I love watching the Games each time they run around; I love watching that badminton player from Uganda win that country's first-ever gold medal, love watching that truck-driving shot-putter become a national hero for exactly one moment of his life.

And speaking of all this, I guess maybe this is the third thing that has led to me becoming so obsessed with this year's Games; that it's not just that NBC has been offering all this supplemental coverage online for free, but that (hallelujah) it's actually been working great as well. And let's face it, this is nothing to sneeze at when I talk about it; I myself, for example, own a crappy little sole-processor Mac Mini, one that's halfway on the road to fatally crashing as it is, so when I say that a Microsoft-powered online streaming video project works great on my stupid little home computer, that's saying something profound indeed. For example, one of the really cool options that has been working perfectly all week for me has been the "four-event" option you're seeing in the screenshot above; believe it or not, that's actually four live events you're seeing in that image, all of them being streamed to me at once, all of them working perfectly on my particular computer, which I was so astounded by I didn't even know where to start when first booting it up. (You can watch the events like this, then, if you want; or you can click on any of them to bring just it up to full-size; or you can click it again to turn it into a full-screen streaming image.)

This has been cool enough, of course, but NBC's online coverage has been a lot more than this; they're not only streaming all these events live, but then recording them and putting up the huge long files online too, so that if you miss an event you can go back and literally watch it in real time, as if you were watching it live. But not just that, but I guess each and every one of the 28 sports being represented at the Olympics this year has its own NBC chief and its own NBC crew; so every single section there has not only live coverage, not only long-term recordings, but daily synopses, a "best-of" video every single day, a plethora of five-minute "storytelling profiles" of that particular sport's stars, full write-ups at the site of that sport's history and rules and official Olympic history, all kinds of fun "behind the scenes" videos (you know, where NBC films the water-polo team all having dinner at a Chinese restaurant), etc etc etc. And it's not only concerning all the sporting events where NBC has bothered to put up professionally edited videos; they also have an entire page there just on non-sports Beijing reports, the Today Show crew running around the city being goofy, breathtaking videos of kites being flown in the Forbidden City, gossipy videos where gymnasts speculate which of them is the messiest over in the dorms of the Olympic Village, just all kinds of cool funny fascinating random things over there, just thousands and thousands and thousands of hours' worth (including, yes, a full digital version of the opening ceremonies, for those who would like to see them again without shelling out for that high-def DVD NBC is currently selling).

Image courtesy Kris Krüg.

And then all this, of course, leads us to the next reason I believe I'm so fascinated this year by the Beijing Games in particular; not just the Games themselves, of course, but the fact that they're in Beijing, in a China that is suddenly and explosively in our global culture right now becoming one of the most fascinating places on the planet. Like many others, I too acknowledge that it's the eastern half of the world that is suddenly gaining a lot more importance in world affairs these days; it's hard to deny anymore, frankly, that China is destined to be a leader and shaper in world affairs over the next ten or twenty years, that it's certainly possible for them to actually have a bigger economy than America's once those twenty years are up (the first time since literally the 1940s that another country on the planet would have a larger economy than the US). Like many Americans these days, I find myself with a real fascination for this utterly mysterious, utterly secretive country, this country that has so deliberately walled itself off from the rest of the world for the last 500 years, an isolationist overreaction to Ghengis Khan that has literally been their state policy ever since; and in fact, I believe you can see these Games as Beijing's official "coming out" party, as this powerful country's first tentative steps into the wide-eyed world of wonder known as global culture.

In fact, I was just talking with a friend of mine the other day about this whole subject -- of whether it's still possible for an Olympics to have the kind of long-term historical impact on a city or country that it used to, which of course is why the modern Olympic Games have grown over the last century from an obscure elitist weekend party into one of the largest organized human gatherings on the planet. My answer, of course, is "yes," and I think you can just point to the Beijing Games for ample proof of this; because the fact of the matter is that I'm walking away at the end of these Games with a much different picture now in my head of what China's all about, versus the picture I had in my head of that country beforehand. I know that that is partly a false image, and that it's partly an artificially manufactured image; I don't deny that, just as I don't deny that there are currently around twenty Americans in Beijing who have simply disappeared over the last two weeks, all of them liberal political activists who most agree have probably been kidnapped by the Chinese police and are being very quietly held in some basement jail cell until exactly the morning after the closing ceremonies.

Image courtesy Kris Krüg.

No, what I'm saying is this -- that in a post-9/11 world, I am trying as an American to get to a place where I don't judge an entire set of people anymore simply by the official actions of their official government. This after all was one of the most profound experiences I had as an American myself when traveling through Europe for the first time, in 2003 and '04; how I had arrived just expecting most random strangers to hate me because of being an American, to just randomly spit on me on sidewalks and the like, of how shocked and surprised and pleased I was that most Europeans were willing to simply accept me at face value. That had a big effect on me, and was a very emotional experience for me as a post-9/11 American to have; and ever since, I've become more and more determined in my own life to be this way too, to try to view people from other countries in simple individual terms, instead of a reflection of the people currently in power wherever they're from. The Beijing Games did a lot, a lot, to support and further this kind of mindset for me; for the first time in my life, it gave me as a random American a look at the average Chinese citizen in a way I've never gotten to see it before. Laughing kids on crowded trains. Jaded hipsters smoking cigarettes and growling in the backgrounds of every stupid tourist shot. Proud, conservative, middle-class shop owners, who you just know are spending their free time making contributions to whatever the Chinese equivalent of "Cute Overload" is.

This has ultimately been the most interesting thing about this year's Games of all for me -- of getting these glimpses into the general Chinese culture, the little moments we see in the background of these official events, all the little great moments captured by amateur Western Flickr members over in Beijing as we speak. This is what's ultimately had me addicted to the Beijing Games in particular, versus for example the Sydney Games in 2000 that I didn't watch that much of; because as incomplete as it is, as politically manipulated as it sometimes is, it's legitimately fascinating to get the small inside look at Chinese culture that these particular Games have afforded us, at a time when all of us in the West are thinking of China more and more and more. Because let's make no mistake, America is generally reacting to these Games with a nervous chuckle and silent bead of sweat trickling down the side of its collective face; a sorta "Ha ha, how great for them, how great that China is doing so well at the Olympics this year, how great that they spent forty billion freaking dollars on their Olympics this year, ha ha, how great they actually have forty billion extra dollars to spend on something like a stupid amateur sporting competition, ha ha, ha ha, oh Jesus Christ are we fucked ha ha, ha ha."

Most Americans won't admit to it, most Americans in fact don't even want to think about it, but that is how we're generally reacting to these Olympics; a certain awe over how well the Chinese have pulled it off, a certain disbelief over just how much goddamn money they spent to pull it off, a certain existential dread over what this says concerning what else China could do these days if they were really determined. The global order is changing, and it's changing rapidly; and how astounding that the Olympics would be held right at this moment right in the epicenter of where most of this global change is happening. How astounding that in 2008, this fruity French elitist Victorian experiment should still be so relevant, still be so game-changing an event in such a truly global way. This is why I keep watching the Olympics every time they're held. This is why I love them so much. And this, I'm convinced, is why I've been so much more into the Beijing Games in particular this year, versus all the others that have happened since I was seven years old, laying in front of the TV in my pajamas on a Saturday night, watching a cutie little oppressed Communist spin her way into gold and history.

The closing ceremonies are tomorrow. Will you be one of the billion people on this planet watching? I will. Hope to see you there.