Without sound, however, we were completely lost as to the introduction of the national teams. All we knew that was in no way based on A) alphabetical order, B) size, C) geography.
My friends at wikipedia tell me that the teams entered in the order of the number of strokes in the first character of their name written with Simplified Chinese characters, in the same way words are classified on a standard Chinese dictionary.
Wouldn't have guessed that!
Luckily I got to see the eight athletes from the United Arab Emirates enter:
Included in the delegation for the first time are women - including Sheikh Mo's daughter Sheikha Maitha bint Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, who will compete in taekwondo.
And then the five-or-six-hundred Americans:
Ooh look, Laura woke up George and told him to put on his sportcoat. How nice.
And then we cut back to a few hundred more Americans:
Sadly in their broadcast NBC had to cut to commercials, and apparently Beijing didn't stop the parade of nations every seven minutes. So a few countries got the short end of the stick, a hasty edit of "this is what you missed when we were showing you endless promos for The Office, ER and Chuck".
But America - I swear we saw every single athlete up close and personal. And then when other countries were still pouring in we cut away to the holding tank where the American athletes are just standing around. Look! LeBron James is in a suit! And Kobe Bryant is standing next to him! Yay America!
What did the Muppets' Sam Eagle say in the MuppetVision 3D show? "It's a three hour salute to all nations - but mostly America."
Yep.
