2016 Summer Olympics

The games kicked off today, and there's already been a bunch of medal ceremonies.

Where are you from and who are you rooting for? Which athlete or event do you look forward to watching?

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[ J ] - [ S ] - [ F ]

Don't know why, but I find swimming events boring.
I always like Olympic volleyball. I like gymnastics. (I like curling too because it's so damn weird - but that's only part of winter Olympics.)
I'm not a soccer fan but tonight watched the end of a match between Brazil & Sweden's women's teams.

I don't really follow any sports, but I will watch some Olympics.

Happy to see Canada win their first medal today. Bronze in women's 4x100m freestyle relay swimming, with two 16-year-olds competing for them!

Athletics will always be my primary interest in the Olympics, but am also partial to the canoeing for some reason. Hoping Ireland can win a couple of medals - any colour will do though naturally hoping Katie Taylor can win gold again in the women's 60kg.

I swear, Britain came 4th in about 3 swimming finals yesterday still, we have some better opportunities today!

Watching Brazil vs Iraq in men's football. Brazil should cruise to a win.

Same. Have you watched any more of the football? I haven't but there seems to have been an absurd amount of goals so far, two people went 4 goals in 1 game.

Too bad that very few of the players that do well here ever amount to anything.

Tennis is the only sport i really care about here since most of the best usually show up unlike a few other sports.

Boxing is always interesting to watch as well, i mean 4 years ago Anthony Joshua was just a most likely won't go far boxer who came away with the gold. Now, he is the most overrated boxer on the planet

Brazil is complete shiite these days. Since the 7-1 the national team has been performing far below expected. In the Copa America this year we lost to Peru (which is not as bad as Iraq but not a 1st rate team) in the group stage!

In Brazil we liked that our opening was pretty good (IMO better than the UK's opening last Olympics and more artistic and natural than China's aggressive show). Specially considering the bad opening of the world cup (which nobody cares about).

Personally,i preferred the 2012 Opening to this years but i'm already annoyed at people making out as if ours was something that great tbh. China 2008>Britain 2012>Brazil 2016 IMO.

I agree Camo, China's opening ceremony was fantastic. London's was pretty good, but not amazing. Brazil had its moments, but had awful singers and some underwhelming moments, but I still enjoyed it a lot, just not as much as London or China.

That's because Brazil's opening ceremony requires a Brazilian cultural background to be fully understood. It's a more artistic opening than the usual in the Olympics.

While China's opening was just a Stalinist parade with costumes.

Explain it to us then? Don't accept that you need a certain cultural background to understand something artistic, and if you do then IMO it isn't very artistic at all and more exclusive and boring.

Maybe Brazil should've realized that it isn't the only country in the world if it didn't want its highly artistic ceremony misunderstood? If that's even what it was of course.

The BBC literally explained the significance of everything on stage but of course it was going to suffer a bit with a budget 20 times smaller than Beijing, and 12 times smaller than London. I did enjoy it overall, don't get me wrong, I just thought some of the singers weren't very good, and the model walking across the stage took forever.

I thought it was solid and not that far off the British one, but to claim it was more artistic than others because you yourself are from that country and thus understand your artistic culture better. Is absurd IMO. I could easily claim some obscure Scottish thing is more artistic than a similar famous thing because i both understand and value it more but it doesn't make it so and it instantly comes off biased.

No, artistic appreciation is culturally constructed. An Ethiopian tribal will not understand why The Godfather is considered better than Adam Sandler's movies without experience with American culture.

It's was a very Brazilian ceremony. Since people outside Brazil don't know Brazilian culture they will not understand it.

Why they made it very Brazilian? Because it's in Brazil and Brazilian culture is reflected in things made by Brazilians.

The Chinese opening, for example, was a military parade with costumes, very much in line with the Chinese communist party.

That's ludicrous. You cannot just "explain" things in a small window of time and expect to get the same level of cultural understanding than a native or someone with years of experience.

Source for that?

It's natural for someone without experience with Brazilian music to dislike it. If you show modern rock to a person from the 19th century they will think it's horrible.

I loved the Chinese opening for their Olympics, I must be able to understand their culture because I buy all their cheap products at Wallmart

No, it's was more artistic than the Chinese opening because it's focus was not on symmetry and more in overall richness.

The Chinese opening was basically a military parade with costumes designed to impress foreigners into thinking "holy shitte, China's a superpower".

Opinions regarding art are always biased by your cultural background. Actually its strictly impossible to have an "unbiased" opinion regarding art and to even think that's possible is absurd.

Why do you think Americans like American movies more than foreign movies on average? That's because Americans don't get movies made by a different culture because they lack the cultural background to understand them.