Bolt from the Blue!!

so its olympics time...and post the hysteria of AB followed by the diasppointment of Saina and Lee-hesh, i was very excited by the most hyped event of the Beijing Olympics....the mens 100 m dash...Bolt Vs Powell vs the american sprinter whose name I forget (Tyson Gay, followin a google search )..the fastest human being on the planet title...it was already assumed that the woman who would win the 100 m would run it slower than the man/men..and I agree this is probably true for this olympics.....but I guess we may yet live to see the day when in another Olympics the fastest human being on the planet wont be a descendant of Bolt....

But amazing as Bolt was (and there r comments already of doping and arrogance, this story I think will last sometime like Ben Johnson's),the bolt from the blue was not from him...it was kind of expected.....Powell or Bolt.....and inspite doubts of his injury he was always the either or option for comon folks and experts alike.....

the bolt was from NBC....so i missed the race......and when iGoogle tells you that Bolt had won..it is but natural that you would fidget on your keypads to try and retrieve the images which you could not witness live..and what better way than to use youtube..

However,the generally dead-on search of youtube seemed to falter at first..i got the results...but they were more images than the actual race......a few clicks down the line, i did manage to find the video...the entire 100 m mens final......9.69 secs and the video was ony 1.15 mins....

Brought up on the tv analysis/paralysis cricket broadcasts in India, I was left asking
for more...the slow motion replays...the analyis..the perrfect start...the burst in the middle...the powell riddle....but searched and googled as hard as I could, I found nothing..except for the images..the music and the nostalgic videos celebrating Bolt...which was fine.....

The surprise came later though........3 hours later, I decided to watch those 1:15 minutes yet again.....but the video was no longer there..NBC had claimed copyright to it..and whatever else you can find on youtube ( nd I ve never been disappointed in finding anything from the exotic to the erotic), as of 24 hours after one of the greatest performance in the Olympics, you wont find that video on you tube...

Which is kind of like a bolt from the blue......Copyright is a legal issue, I get it...and NBC is surely within its right to pull off that video...but why???..its a 1:15 mins piece......people who search and watch it on the net(highyly likely it will be on you tube and then on torrents) will all likelihood have an attention span that wont allow them to stay glued to NBC......others who watch it fwded in their e-mails, dont care much about that event anyways whether its on NBC or youtube....but I guess NBC thinks this 1:15 mins have potential....I could find Federrers last game in the doubles match where he won gold...No copy right on that video.....probably not that much potential for NBC...

But this one was obviously special.....strangely though, NBCs official site did not feature the Bolt race prominently....I would have thought it would have been right out there...but 4 clicks later ( olympics->videos->track and field->next page ) i still did not see the Bolt video..

In the coming days, I guess we will see it replayed and analyzed innumerbale times on NBC...and personally i wil love those slo mos and expert analysis ...but it is with some disappointment that I reconcile to the fact that I cannot watch Bolt now when I want to....NBC might have just upstaged Bolt by delivering a bolt from the blue in a time when the net is increasingly gaining focus (e.g.,Comcast and P2P traffic, all the talk about net neutrality), at least in the US.....

In a couple of hours I think this might well change........Bolt might still well rule youtube and the net...with or without NBCs copyright issues.....tht will be a bolt expected and well delivered....

cheers!!..:))