Good morning. Today's lone public Olympic event is the Opening Ceremony, which begins at 4 p.m. EDT. NBC will not air the broadcast until the evening, however, at 7:30 p.m. in all time zones. We'll have a post later about that issue, and how you can watch. For now, here's a rundown of news items:
- British betting shops are giving even odds that legendary runner Roger Bannister will light the Olympic cauldron at tonight's Opening Ceremony. Other possibilities include "Steve Redgrave, Daley Thompson, Kelly Holmes and David Beckham," the AP says. The lighter's identity has been kept a secret.
- Archery fans, many of them believing they had bought official tickets to preliminary rounds at Lord's Cricket Ground, were turned away in anger today, after Olympic officials told them no such tickets to the closed event ever existed. Other fans thought the event was free. They, too, were angry.
- The Olympics have gotten their own , with a cartoonish drawing of kids on an athletic field holding the company's letters. The "alt text" for the image reads simply, "Hurray for sports!" Clicking the image takes users to search results for Opening Ceremony London 2012. You can check out past doodles here.
- Monday will bring the start of the Poetry Games. No, it doesn't pit teen combatants against one another in a dystopian empire. NPR's Books department explains: "Each morning next week, we'll introduce a new poem on Morning Edition, and then you, the audience, will judge who should win the victor's laurel crown."
- And the U.S. swim team has proven unable to resist the urge to make its own video for Carly Rae Jepsen's summer anthem "Call Me Maybe." As you might expect, they spend a lot of their time by the water:
Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
