Opening Ceremonies are Friday, but already the Games of the XXX Olympiad (which are really going to mess up some internet content filters with those Roman numerals) have begun with some early-round soccer games. While you can find Olympic previews everywhere, only here will you get the unique Continuum perspective. So strike up the John Williams music and go below the jump for the (rather tongue-in-cheek) inaugural installment of Olympics Continuum:

The Opening Ceremony: The British pull out all the stops, Disney will get unintentionally free advertising, and an eclectic mix of music is played. Oh, and Sherlock Holmes and Dracula get snubbed.

The Opening Ceremony, one of the great (tape-delayed) spectacles in the world. Four years ago, the Chinese put together a show that only a heavily-regimented authoritarian government can give, complete with hundreds of drummers playing in unison, a cute little girl lip-syncing the singing voice of a less-cute girl and a gymnast seemingly running up the stadium to light the torch as they paid tribute to one of the world’s oldest and most distinguished civilizations.

The British will counter with pop culture and, well, Britishness. Created by Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle, it will reportedly be inspired by Shakespeare and the poet William Blake, tracing Great Britain’s movement from pastoral land to modern society, with special tributes to country villages, the UK’s National Health Service, Tim Berners-Lee‘s role in the invention of the Internet, and a salute to English literature.

That previous paragraph probably makes you think it’ll be boring. But based on leaks about it, it won’t be. In fact, it sounds absolutely crazy. It’ll apparently start with Daniel Craig as James Bond receiving a special mission from Queen Elizabeth, and near the end of the ceremonies there will be a appearance by Harry Potter villain Lord Voldemort, who will crash a show featuring Alice (as in Wonderland), Captain Hook and Cruella De Vil. Then, when all hope will seem lost, he will be defeated by 30 Mary Poppins impersonators. It’s going to really stink if NBC cuts all of this out of the tape-delayed TV special so as to not give Disney free publicity.

And that’s not all! A leaked setlist of music to be played hints at further weirdness. Oh, sure, everybody expects some tunes from the Beatles (Paul McCartney, by the way, will apparently finish the whole ceremony with a good old-fashioned rendition of “Hey Jude”), the Rolling Stones, David Bowie and Queen, mixed with more recent British acts like Coldplay and Adele, but how in the world are they going to have the theme from Doctor Who in there? Or the Monty Python theme (which, fun trivia here, is actually John Phillip Sousa’s American patriotic march, “The Liberty Bell”), for that matter?

And where the heck are Sherlock Holmes and Dracula? Cruella De Vil gets in, but the two most portrayed characters in history are left out?

Who’ll light the Olympic Flame?

Oh, and if you are wondering who I think will light the cauldron, I have to admit I have no clue. I was thinking Roger Bannister, but he apparently already has run with the torch, so I doubt he’ll be doing the lighting of the cauldron. David Beckham has said he doesn’t want to do it, since he wasn’t picked for the Olympic team. Most of the speculation has been on five-time gold medal rower Steve Redgrave, but it never seems to be the person everybody thinks it will be. Muhammad Ali is in London, but he’s A) Not British, B) a previous cauldron-lighter and C) increasingly crippled by the cruel Parkinson’s that ravages his body.

Unless… there’s something at work here. London will be first city to host three Olympic games. The 1908 London Olympics are generally considered to be the first Olympic games that truly caught the world’s attention and are said to have in some ways saved the Olympic movement. What if the opening ceremony aims to use those facts to honor previous Olympics, by having a group of past greats, representing various nations, all light the cauldron simultaneously as a group? Does anybody know where Nadia Comaneci and Ian Thorpe are on Friday? Or Steve Redgrave, for that matter?

The British Tabloids will be offended by the USA during the aforementioned ceremony

History lesson! In 1908, the first time that London hosted the Olympics, almost every country dipped their flag in tribute as they passed the royal box. The USA didn’t.

According to legend, it was because shotputter Ralph Rose declared that “This flag dips for no earthly king.” Of course, it might not actually have happened, but it makes a good story.

So it has been on-and-off since then. Starting in the 1930s it was codified by the USOC: the Stars and Stripes dip to nobody. And it certainly won’t be dipping to Queen Elizabeth.

This will annoy certain people. Like the British tabloids, some of which are, from what I understand, notoriously thin skinned and easily offended. Why, it’s entirely possible that they will make whoever is carrying the flag public enemy number one. Therefore, the US must choose somebody who is used to this. Somebody strong, who is both beloved and hated. Somebody who can take it….

Go get ’em, Lebron!

(Note: Shortly after I wrote those words, it came out that Fencer Mariel Zagunis will be the flag-bearer for the USA. But I’m not going to let that get in the way of my joke.)

Lochte vs. Phelps (and Phelps vs. History)

After Beijing, Michael Phelps kind of lost his fire, instead focusing on partying, doing commercials, and generally not caring. That is, until Ryan Lochte started beating him. Then, Phelps started to once again be, well, Michael Phelps. Every swimming race they are going against each other will ultimately be a duel between them- in some events they are over a second faster than their nearest competitors.

While they are at it, Michael Phelps will also be going after Larisa Latynina, the former Soviet gymnast who holds the all-time record for Olympic medals with 18. Phelps is at 16, and he’s regarded as a cinch to at least medal in basically every event he is in.

So, in short, Latynina’s record is going down, and Michael Phelps will become the unquestioned greatest Olympic Champion in the History of Olympics. Or something.

China will rack up lots of medals in sports that aren’t TV-friendly, totally ruining it’s role as chief rival of the United States

China became the first country since 1992 (when the former USSR competed as a Unified Team)  to overtake the USA in gold medals, and came very close to winning the overall medal count. They did this by, essentially, putting lots of emphasis on sports that most countries really don’t even pay attention to (at least on TV) but which provide lots of medal opportunities, such as weightlifting, shooting, and diving. It’s a good strategy, and thanks to the Middle Kingdom’s vaunted government sports program, which picks children from a young age and then trains them until retirement, it provides results.

However, what it doesn’t do is provide any soap-box material to allow non-sports columnists and talking heads a way to somehow equate the games to geopolitical affairs between China and the West. The only times the USA and China continually will meet on the playing field in primetime sports with both having good chances at medals will be gymnastics. Otherwise, the two might as well be playing entirely separate games.

The basketball team will lose if it wins and lose if it loses

Rumor has it that David Stern and the other NBA movers-and-shakers want to shake up international hoops. Basically, they want to neuter it by forcing FIBA to make it a 23-and-under tournament, and then proceed to make their own event that the NBA can profit from. Quick, when was the last time you heard anything about men’s side of Olympic soccer? Well, the NBA wants to push Olympic basketball to that level of play.

Really, the only way that this plan can be stopped would be if Team USA were to fail to win Gold. If that happens, America will cry out for blood, and the best-of-the-best will be sent to Rio de Janeiro in 2016 to get revenge. Sending anything less than all of the best will be unacceptable.

On the other hand, should they fail to win a gold medal, Team USA might not be let back into the country anyway, which would make it a mute point. So, really, if they win, they destroy Olympic basketball, and if they lose, they become pariahs in the history of USA basketball.

No pressure.

Don’t false start.

The false start rule in track and field has been made zero-tolerance: if you false start, you are out. Even if you are Usain Bolt. The sound you will hear if somebody like Bolt is disqualified won’t just be Jamaica screaming, it’ll be the producers at NBC screaming. Once swimming is done, after all, most of the attention of the tape-delayed primetime show shifts to track and field. And track and field without Usain Bolt or his primary rival, fellow Jamaican Yohan Blake, would be like swimming without Phelps or Lochte.

Archery will be the breakout sport of this Olympics.

Every Olympics has one or two sports that are relatively obscure that suddenly become omnipresent in coverage of the games. Curling, for example. This year it will be archery, thanks to the power of the movies. Three major releases this summer have had an archer as a character: Hunger Games, The Avengers and Brave. The CW is going to have a TV series about Green Arrow, who is easily the ninth best superhero in DC Comics, not counting sidekicks. Archery is the in-thing, and I’m sure that sometime in the next decade or two an American will be standing on the medal podium thanking Hawkeye or the Hunger Games for getting them into the sport in the first place.

There are worse reasons to get into a sport.

Synchronized Swimming, Rhythmic Gymnastics and Trampolining are Olympic Sports…

…and baseball and softball aren’t. Nor are skateboarding, karate, squash, racquetball, jiu-jitsu, cricket, MMA, rock-climbing or countless other sports or athletic activities that are way more popular around the world and have far more participants and spectators around the world than synchronized swimming, rhythmic gymnastics and trampolining.  Those three sports, it should be noted, also apparently were considered more Olympic-worthy than golf and rugby, which will be in the Olympics in 2016.

I mean, I get that the Olympics can’t have 50 sports every single time or something like that, otherwise only about ten countries would ever be able to try and host, but what I don’t get it why they don’t do something like this:

Have certain events be permanent Olympic events that must always be in. These would be the ones that have been around for decades or which get the most eyeballs around the globe, the events that the Olympics are built upon. In addition to those 20 (guesstimating) sports, the hosting country would have to pick at least eight additional ones from a list of Olympic-approved events (i.e. sports that are played on a international level enough). If a city has the facilities to host Greek-Gods-know-how-many sports or the money and will to build those facilities, good for them, go ahead and try to host 40+ sports in the Olympics (Los Angeles could probably pull it off), but otherwise, a city would just go and do the sports it wants. This would A) keep costs down and B) give local flavor to each Olympics.

Take London, for example. They might not have wanted handball, so they could have replaced it with rugby. In 2016, Rio might prefer having a Jiu-Jitsu tournament instead of Taekwondo. If Tokyo- said to be the early favorite for the 2020 Olympics- were to have it, they could bring back baseball and softball while adding in karate.

It’s worth considering.

International Incidents Watch

Already the Olympics have caused a international incident, as somebody hit the wrong button somewhere, causing the North Korean women’s soccer team to be displayed with a South Korean flag. Whoops. Well, at least they got the peninsula right.

Come back throughout the games of the XXX Olympiad for more “Olympics Continuum”.