Changing Sides

I'm in LAX at the moment, waiting to get my flight to New Orleans: last night I crossed the Pacific for the fourth time this year (only five more to go!). Everyone in the Koru Club in Auckland Airport was watching one of the TVs, because the Olympic rowing finals were on. Too much tension and excitement, especially Mahe Drysdale's race; we were all shouting at the screen. And the photo-finish for the twins! It was New Zealand's best day ever at the Olympics, with five medals, including our first track & field gold since John Walker won the 1500 meters in Montreal. Plus the All Blacks beat the Springboks 19-0 in South Africa.

The best part of all is that my brother has to pay me five dollars, because he was insistent we wouldn't win a single gold medal and now we've won two. I rang him from the Koru Club, before I raced downstairs to board the plane, to remind him of the bet.

All this "we" talk must cease now I'm back in the land of my other citi.zenship. I must learn to love beach volleyball and basketball, the sports that are on the TV at the Red Carpet Club. I must learn not to check results on the Internet, but to watch everything unfold pretend-live during prime time on television.

According to the Guardian, New Zealand is now 14th in the medal table;The New York Times says 16th. This is because the NYT organizes the table according to total number of medals won, which puts the US in the lead, whereas the media in the UK, Australia and New Zealand rank by numbers of gold medals, which puts China first. (Australia ranks higher in the American chart, by the way, than the order-by-gold method.) I checked some other web sites: Die Zeit uses the gold ranking as well, as does Le Monde. 

It's been great being home for the first week of the Olympics, because sometimes the US coverage can feel relentlessly myopic. One year I sat through hours and hours of the opening ceremony waiting to see New Zealand walk in, only to have NBC cut away at the crucial moment to an interview with members of the so-called Dream Team. This year, T. Middy tells me, they cut away to a commercial. "And, as the Kiwis walk in, we'll take a break." Sorry, small country!

The one time I was moved to complain (characterizing the NBC sports nabobs as "jesters", as I recall) was in 96, I think, when the great Jamaican runner Merlene Ottey won silver in the 100 metres, and American runners won first and third. During the medal ceremony, the camera zoomed in on the two Americans alone, so you couldn't see Ottey at all. Classy!

T. Middy also tells me that the lead story on our local NBC news affiliate in New Orleans last night was ... Michael Phelps wins seventh gold. This was good news, I thought: it meant that nobody was getting shot in New Orleans for a change. But what a difference a day makes.