Have you heard about the Vancouver Olympics' most recent controversy? The Vancouver Olympic Committee invited the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra to play at the Opening Ceremonies of the Winter Olympics in February. When VANOC suggested that conductor, Bramwell Tovey, pre-tape the performance and then have another conductor mime it on the actual night, Tovey refused. Since then, VANOC has apologized to Tovey and the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra is now happy to play during the Olympics. The orchestra will also record the national anthems of participating countries to be played at the medal ceremonies. While VANOC's reasoning is understandable, in that many musical performances are pre-taped for live events to ensure good sound quality for broadcasting purposes, I'm surprised that they suggested having a conductor other than Tovey at the actual Opening Ceremonies. This reminds me of the controversy at the Summer Olympics in Beijing in 2008, when a young Chinese girl won the chance to record a song for the Opening Ceremonies and the Olympic Committee chose another, more attractive girl to lip sync to it at the event itself.
By the way, if anyone feels like rewarding me for doing such a great job on this blog by buying me tickets to the Olympics, the official Vancouver2010 website has opened a fan-to-fan marketplace for fans to buy and sell tickets off of each other. Just fyi, there are some skating tickets in there... Happy holidays to me. :) Ticket holders can also be a bit more charitable and donate their tickets to underprivileged kids who wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity to go to the Olympics.
Here's a trivia question for you: Which American actor won 6 Olympics medals (in 1924 and 1928), 52 U.S. National Championships and set 67 world records in swimming? That would be Johnny Weissmuller who was best known for playing Tarzan in twelve films.
In a survey completed by over 2100 athletes who competed in the Summer and Winter Olympics between 1984-1998, 52% of Olympians felt that family support greatly factored into their Olympic success.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I'd like to know more about the 48% of the athletes who said that family support WASN'T a factor.
ReplyDeleteTheir parents get up at 3:00 AM in the cold to drive them to practice and take out second mortgages to finance their athletic careers. And then the kids repay their parents' sacrifices by saying, "It was all my hard work and the talent with which God blessed me."
Rotten, spoled brat, ingrates.