Olympics Coverage, Germany edition

The Olympics coverage in Germany is pretty good.  The two main channels alternate days of coverage, and they show the Olympics all day.  As much as possible is shown live.  We also have access to Swiss and Austrian channels, which also cover the Olympics all day (not everyone in Germany gets those channels, though).  So, when the Olympics were in England, we saw pretty much everything live.  Russia is only 3 hours ahead, so it works pretty well again; they start coverage around 6:30am, and it ends around 8 or 9pm.  Also, the German TV website has live streaming and videos of entire events.  However, it doesn't have video of all events, and you don't know beforehand which events it will have.  So if two things are happening at the same time, you can't necessarily watch the other one later.

World Cup

The World Cup is more than halfway done now, but it's still a big deal. Of course, the big disappointment here was Italy going out in the first round, after tying "lowly" Paraguay and New Zealand and then losing to Slovakia. People were certainly not expecting a repeat performance of 2006, and were heaping criticism on the coach even before the tournament started for picking the wrong players, but the final game was nevertheless a blow (although they had to admit that the Italian team really only started playing 15 minutes before the end). Since then, the number of Italian flags hanging on balconies has decreased somewhat, but the interest in the tournament has remained, at least from what I can tell at work.
Italy being Italy, it's of course more difficult to watch the games here than it should be. Since the state-funded RAI networks only bought the rights to some of the games (about one a day), the others being shown on subscription-only Sky, most games during the day are also not available for online streaming. So for some weekend games, we've gone to an Irish pub downtown (where we saw the glorious German victory over England this past weekend), otherwise we're reliant on some poor quality pirated streams of ESPN, BBC, or Chinese TV.

Olympics Coverage

I've been trying to watch the Olympics -- we don't have a TV -- and luckily Rai lets you watch TV online. So that is nice. However, they only show skiing events, since those are happening in the evening here (they don't bother with curling or hockey). Of course NBC won't let anyone outside the US watch any videos on their site. So I was looking around for a way to watch other events like figure skating, snowboarding, or speed skating, and discovered this list of countries that can watch Eurovision's programming online. Unbelievable. While Italy is not on the list, countries in the Caribbean, south Pacific, north Africa, Russia and other countries bordering China, etc. can watch Eurovision online. Even San Marino, a microstate completely surrounded by Italy, is on the list. Non ho parole.
UPDATE: Evidently, Sky Italia acquired the broadcasting rights from the IOC, instead of Eurovision. But Sky Italia's site has very few videos, and most of them are delivered in blips. And you can't watch anything live online.

Calcio storico

One of the perks of living in Florence, instead of just visiting for a few days, is that you can take advantage of the various events that happen throughout the year. Today, we went to a “calcio storico” game in Santa Croce square, a game dating back to the 16^th century. Even though calcio is the word for soccer in Italian, this sport was more like a cross between football and rugby, with some wrestling thrown in. The tournament pits the four quarters of the city against each other, the winner getting a live cow (or the equivalent in steaks, I’ve read different things). We were seated in the green section, though the San Giovanni quarter of the city didn’t end up being able to field a team, and so their team was replaced by a purple team of free agents. I guess their motivation was therefore not high enough, and “our” team ended up clearly losing to the red team from Santa Maria Novella. Before and after the game, there was a procession of people in historical costume, which was quite photogenic when combined with the backdrop of Santa Croce church.