Waxy.org
Waxy.org is the sandbox of Andy Baio, a journalist/programmer living in Portland, Oregon. I'm the CTO of Kickstarter, created Upcoming.org, and some other stuff too.

Contact Me: log@waxy.org or waxpancake on AIM

Olympics 2004 on Usenet

Posted Aug 24, 2004

As predicted, many of the Athens 2004 Olympics events are being digitized and uploaded to the Internet. The quality is good, often ripped from HDTV and international sources. (Many of the clips are from Brazilian television, with commentary in Portuguese. Those darn Brazilians again!)

To judge the video quality, here's a sample clip of yesterday's controversial judging of Russia's Alexei Nemov, in which the audience's vocal protests shut down the Men's Gymnastics High Bar Finals for a full ten minutes.

Video: Alexei Nemov - Male Gymnastics High Bar Finals (Sample) (.MPG, 25MB)

Like Yahoo's Most Popular, there's an emphasis on women's beach volleyball and women's gymnastics. But many other events are represented, as well. Below is a list of every event posted to the alt.binaries.olympics Usenet newsgroup since the Olympics started on August 13.

2004 Olympics Opening Ceremony
Artistic Gymnastics Women, All Round Finals
Artistic Gymnastics Women, Team Finals
Basketball Men's, 15th August 2004, USA vs. Puerto Rico
Basketball Women's BRAZIL vs NIGERIA, Aug 20th
Basketball Women's, Aug 16th - BRA vs. GREECE
Basketball Women's, BRAZIL vs AUSTRALIA, Aug. 22nd
Basketball Women's, Brazil vs Japan, Aug 14th
Basketball Women's, BRAZIL vs. RUSSIA, Aug 18th
Beach Volleyball Men's, BRA vs USA, Aug 19th
Beach Volleyball Men's, BRA vs. CUB, Aug 17th
Beach Volleyball Men's, BRAZIL vs SWITZERLAND, Aug. 22nd
Beach Volleyball Men's, Semis - BRAZIL vs SWITZERLAND, Aug 23rd
Beach Volleyball Men's, USA vs. Australia
Beach Volleyball Women's, Australia Vs Bulgaria - Highlights
Beach Volleyball Women's, BRA vs BRA, Aug. 22nd
Beach Volleyball Women's, BRA vs. ITA, Aug 17th
Beach Volleyball Women's, BRAZIL vs AUSTRALIA, Aug. 23rd
Beach Volleyball Women's, BRAZIL vs. CUBA, Aug 19th
Beach Volleyball Women's, BRAZIL vs. GERMANY, Aug 19th
Football Women's, BRA vs. GRE, Aug 17th
Football Women's, BRAZIL vs MEXICO, Aug 20th
Gymnastics Women's, Apparatus Finals - BALANCE BEAM, Aug 23rd
Gymnastics Women's, Apparatus Finals - FLOOR, Aug 23rd
Gymnastics Women's, Individual All-around Finals
High Bar Finals Men's, Aug 23rd
Rowing Men's, Eight Prelims
Rowing Women's, Eight Prelims
Swimming Men's, 200 Meter Freestyle Prelims
Swimming Women's, 100 Meter Backstroke Prelims
Swimming, Aug 20th
10m Platform Women's Semis, Aug 21st
Tennis Doubles Men's, Finals. First EVER Gold Medal for Chile, Aug. 21st
Trampoline Men's Semis, Aug 21st
Volleyball Men's, BRA vs. ITA, Just Tie-breaker set, Aug 17th
Volleyball Men's, BRAZIL vs RUSSIA, Aug 21st
Volleyball Men's, BRAZIL vs. NETHERLANDS, Aug 19th
Volleyball Men's, USA vs. Italy
Volleyball Women's, BRAZIL vs GREECE, Aug 20th
Volleyball Women's, BRAZIL vs KOREA, Aug. 22nd
Volleyball Women's, BRAZIL vs. ITALY, Aug 18th

12 Comments (Add Yours)

Aug 25, 2004
6:29 PM  
Tom wrote:

Hey, what newsgroups are these posted in? I dug around but my usenet foo is weak. Thanks.


Aug 25, 2004
6:33 PM  
Andy Baio wrote:

They're all in alt.binaries.olympics.


Aug 25, 2004
8:42 PM  
Tom wrote:

Thanks Andy. My Usenet foo is not so weak. It's the Comcast news servers that have the weak foo.


Aug 26, 2004
6:42 AM  
newbie wrote:

How do I connect to Usenet?
using what software?


Aug 26, 2004
8:15 AM  
Andy Baio wrote:

Usenet is a network that predates the Web, and is more difficult than your average Kazaa-like P2P application. There's a good tutorial at Slyck.

Personally, I recommend using the web interface for Easynews. I wrote about it a couple years ago.


Aug 28, 2004
11:48 AM  
Di wrote:

I tried searching on alt.binaries.olympics for indoors volleyball, but I couldn't find anything... Any help? I've been searching for those everywhere...


Aug 28, 2004
12:06 PM  
Di wrote:

ok, forget about it, I couldn't even sign up to Usenet...


Aug 28, 2004
12:50 PM  
Di wrote:

Do you know anywhere else where I can find indoor volleyball matches from the Olympics??


Aug 29, 2004
5:27 AM  
Aliroe wrote:

Any torrents on gymnastics out there? Suprnova.org has one of Paul Hamm, one on the Female indiv all around finals but no men at all. This saddens me.


Dec 2, 2004
10:08 AM  
Nikole Jolie wrote:

Nice tutorial. I found it very helpful. Thanks.


Feb 27, 2006
1:50 AM  
Goob wrote:

Looks like I'm almost two years too late for the files =) If anybody knows of ANY PLACE where I can get my hands on the entire opening ceremony during the Athens games, please do share that info with me. I've been dieing to see the Cube Man again ever since the Torino games came on.


Apr 10, 2006
6:34 AM  
talor wrote:

I tried searching on alt.binaries.olympics for indoors volleyball, but I couldn't find anything... Any help? I've been searching for those everywhere...


 

Leave a comment





Waxy Links
Ads via The Deck
November 20, 2009
Regretsy gets a book deal — the anonymous author turned out to be April Winchell, collector of audio oddities
Google Chrome OS Demo — a world without a local filesystem and apps; also, the Chrome UI concept video (via)
Patrick Moberg's Internet Vices — funny, Tumblr feels more like beer than wine to me
Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck's "Heaven Can Wait" — Keith Schofield's surreal video and insane treatment were inspired by FFFFOUND and Reddit, but maybe too explicitly (via)
November 19, 2009
YouTube adds machine-translated automatic captions — starting with some partner channels, but auto-timing is available to everyone today
Microsoft tries to patent Edward Tufte's sparklines — they were recently added to Excel
Leonard Lin's Retweet Avatars for Greasemonkey — a subtle change, but a big improvement
Web-ops god John Allspaw leaves Flickr to join Etsy — he's the last of the original Ludicorp team to go (via)
November 18, 2009
Laptop Steering Wheel Desk — don't miss the product photos
Interview with Ralph Eggleston, Pixar's production designer on WALL-E — from last February, but new to me; I didn't know the Axiom had three passenger classes
NSFW: Animated pixel-art video for Flair's "Trucker's Delight" — warning: very offensive and sexist, but the attention to 16-bit detail by director Jérémie Perin is incredible
NY Observer on Anil Dash's new government 2.0 incubator project — Expert Labs debuted at Web 2.0 today, funded with a $500k grant from the MacArthur Foundation
November 17, 2009
Google's Dan Morrill explains how the Droid autofocus breaks every 24.5 days — this gets second-place for quirkiest Android bug (via)
Conan O'Brien and Andy Richter on Zach Galifianakis' Between Two Ferns — his style of comedy usually makes me uncomfortable, but this made me laugh
The Pirate Bay shuts down their tracker for good — they're switching to DHT instead
November 16, 2009
How Darren at Link Machine Go found Belle de Jour's identity five years ago — Brooke was part of the early UK blog scene
ICU64, real-time visualization of Commodore 64 memory — the developer also posted videos of Paradroid and Boulder Dash (via)
Russell Davies on pretending and "barely games" — his SAP prototype looks like great ambient fun (via)
NYT Magazine on the indie gaming movement — nothing new here, but good overview with a wonderful closing anecdote from Cactus
Tim O'Reilly on the pending War for the Web — "more than that, it's a war against the web as an interoperable platform"
November 14, 2009
Jason Scott rounds up Geocities' top 10 most popular MIDI files — along with a torrent with 51,000 MIDIs rescued by Archive Team
Matt Haughey on the discovery of his brain tumor, treatment, and the Internet's response — there were about 1,000 #mathowielove tweets in 24 hours
Belle de Jour reveals herself after six year of anonymity — only six people in the world knew, she only told her parents yesterday (via)
Paul F. Tompkins debates comedy ethics with Improv Everywhere's Charlie Todd — great discussion, and it's hard not to see where both are coming from (via)
November 13, 2009
Rogue Amoeba stops iPhone app development after App Store idiocy — I'm with Marco, the only fix is allowing external apps, but it's unlikely (via)
Numb3rs on IRC — "Luckily, I speak l33t."
Prank War 8: The Skydiving Prank — hard to say if life-threatening situations are funnier than public humiliation
301 Works, Internet Archive works to preserve URL shortener data — the shorteners will provide regular backups and hand over data on closure, though TinyURL's conspicuously missing
November 12, 2009
Quizipedia — simple game with trivia scraped from Wikipedia entries
Kill Screen, funding a new art magazine about videogames — sounds like the English analogue of Amusement I was hoping for

Andy Baio lives here. Some rights reserved, for your pleasure.