Los Juegos Olimpicos, a new perspective

When no one in Spain even seemed to be aware that the Olympics were starting, I realized that a Spanish perspective on the Olympics was going to be very different from what I was used to. America loves the Olympics, and why wouldn't we? What's not to like about watching your athletes win gold medal after gold medal after gold medal? Things are different in Spain though, especially for the Winter Olympics (It is March, after all, and I haven't seen a single flake of snow all winter). Spain has NEVER won a medal in the history of the Winter Olympics. Never. In the US, I always felt like the world stopped for two weeks as we all fell in love with the athletes and their stories. Not so much here in Spain!

Even if they're not medal favorites though, the Spanish athletes still get a lot of love during the broadcasts. Since there were only 20 Spanish athletes or so at the Games, they all got a personal introduction during the Opening Ceremony, with a photo, their name and sport. Every event with a Spaniard competing in it gets televised (the downside of this is when the poor athlete doesn't do well. One girl fell in the cross country skiing race and they replayed it ALL NIGHT LONG because she was the only Spaniard who had competed that day and they had nothing else to show).

In the US, I think we tend to forget about the athletes who are living their dream just by competing at the Olympics, since we have so many gold-medal-winning-athletes to focus our attention on. When there's only twenty athletes though, you get to hear about some of the more "ordinary" ones and how hard they worked to get there. There was an article in the newspaper here about a man who lives not too far from me who was competing in biathlon. He had been a triathlon athlete, but had to stop training a few years ago due to the economic crisis and get a "real job" as an engineer. The only way he could "train" was by designing and building his own pair of roller skies and rollerskiing to work every morning. He found out 10 days before the Opening Ceremony that he would be competing in Sochi.

The commentary was also incredibly entertaining. For starters, there was the difficulty they have pronouncing non-Spanish names. The commentators would frequently debate how a name was pronounced. A direct quot from one broadcast is: "It's like those Polish names, way too many syllables!"  Spaniards can also make anything sound exciting. A figure skating fall is so much more entertaining when its accompanied with an "Oooy vaa!"

Watching hockey with Spanish commentary is hilarious.  Words like powerplay, checking, faceoff don't get translated, just pronounced with a Spanish accent. The penalties aren't translated either, so the commentator will say "women body checking" or "high-sticking" then spend the next minute translating that to Spanish and explaining what it means. They call the puck a "disco" and saying "desvió ligeramente" instead of "tipped in" sounds like ballet on ice instead of hockey! All in all, watching hockey in Spanish was a very weird experience.

It was impossible to not feel homesick while watching the Olympics, impossible to see athletes from your country who are so proud of where they´re from and not miss home. Watching your country and compatriots as an outsider and seeing a foreign country from the inside- it was a weird experience, and one I'm glad I could experience.