"I've found it really hard to get enthusiastic about these Olympics..."
- me, opening my Athens 2004 blog, 14.8.04

"So underwhelmed am I about the Games of the XXIX Olympiad..."
- me, opening my Beijing 2008 blog, 9.8.08

Fifteen days till the opening of the Games of the XXX Olympiad and time for me to get serious about yet another Olympic Games blog. It's not actually the start of my blog posts tagged "London 2012" as you'd be able to see but let this entry be a means of introduction.

My tradition of blogging the Olympics goes back to a very primitive page that I set up for the Atlanta Games in 1996, several years before the anyone dreamt of compressing the term "binary log" to blog. All hand-edited html with comments emailed to me before manually be inserted to the page, it's an antique piece which can be seen here.

Sydney 2000, the games were on my doorstep and I was working full-time for Cricinfo so no Olympics writing of my own. I did do an op-ed for Cricinfo at the time on the question of cricket in the Olympics, which at some stage in the twelve years since has vanished (along with a lot of my Cricinfo oeuvre). I did get to the Games on a couple of days, I took a number of photos on Day Five which I have recently crafted into a Flickr set.

By the time Athens 2004 came around, the blog was an established art form as was blogging software. I had a lot of fun blogging the Athens Olympics, although many of the links to related news items have long since broken.

Beijing 2008 seemed strangely less fun but my blog for those Olympics is here.

Expect me to be rather more dark and miserable about London 2012 as I begin my Games preambles over the next few days.