Olympics 2012, London

Olympics 2012 is beginning today. This time it is in London. I live not very far distance from the London, but in one of the European countries France. But I don't feel any excitement among people here for Olympics if compared to European Cup that took place just few days back. All the conversation that take place about Olympics goes around these statements:

A: I guess there are Olympics games some time around this month!
     Do you know when they are starting?
B: No idea, need to check on net. You got any hopes for medal for your country.

A: Yeah, possibly gold in ---, silver in --- and some bronze here and there.
     what about your country?
B: Some similar statement as A

And that's all. All the Olympic related conversation end somewhere close to this. Most of the time, they do not know any of their athletes names. All they say is, "There is a guy who runs very fast. He should win a medal or some such kind of stuff."

I started wondering, whether Europe has any active participation in Olympics or not?

I checked last Olympics medal tally. Well it is not very good, but it is not bad either. There are as good as 10 European countries in top 20 (including England and Russia). But compared to their performance people's interest in Olympics appears very less. I was more surprised over this attitude, because many of the other games (other than Football and Cricket) are quite prevalent among Europeans. They actively participate in different games and follow them religiously.




Compared to that, We Indians hardly play any game. If at all anybody play games, we mostly play Cricket and we totally follow Cricket religiously. The knowledge of other games is close to negligible among most of Indians.

In spite of this situation, we are very much enthusiastic about Olympics and Asian games. Though, these are the only times when we refresh our knowledge about latest lot of players in different games and this knowledge stays in our mind till the next Olympics or Asian games.
 I get my share of excitement about Olympics from Indian newspapers. There are lot of news with hopes of medals from different athletes, wrestlers, archers, shuttlers, boxers, shooters, which are followed by very strong (positive as well as negative) comments by readers.
 Then there are issues (Tennis chaos among pairing of players, injury of main hockey player) that hits the front page of the newspaper.

These things connects us to the Olympics excitement that we are used to over the years although we hardly won any medals in last many years.


This year appear to change the way the story is normally written. We are looking forward to win some good number of medals.

I will try to follow the achievements and disappointments of Indian players and make an update at regular intervals on this blog. Hopefully I succeed in what I am planning.












 Lets give all our best wishes to Indian players. Hope they succeed in their respective competitions.