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You Can Find Olympics All Over The Internet

David Lyman Detroit Free Press

When the Olympics rolled into Barcelona in 1992, relatively few people had ever heard of the Internet or the World Wide Web. Today, the world has gone Net nuts. And leave it to the media-savvy Olympics to take full advantage of this craze. It’s hard to leap a hyperlink these days without running into something to do with the Olympics.

Some are palatial mazes, created to glorify the beneficence of their corporate sponsors. Count AT&T’s bloated site (http: /www.olympic.att.com) in this bunch. The design is airy and handsome. But content? It offers videos that rarely work, “live” photos that only occasionally are in focus and, well into July, was still promising services that were to begin in June.

Interestingly, two of the best also are operated by corporate biggies: ESPN, a Disney subsidiary, and Sports Illustrated, part of the Time-Warner pantheon.

ESPN SportsZone was one of the pioneers of on-line subscription services. But for the Olympics, SportsZone has created a free zone, where Net surfers can browse for hours on end.

Many sites list medal winners from past Olympics. But SportsZone lists every member of every medalwinning team. Similarly, nearly every site touches on Olympic history. But SportsZone does it in depth, giving readers three separate stories about Jesse Owens, for instance, instead of the cursory one that you’re likely to find at other sites.

(http://espnet.sportszone.com/editors/atlanta96/index.html)

Despite its unfathomably complicated address, the Sports Illustrated Olympic Home Page is another wonderfully in-depth site. Like its parent publication, SI’s Web site is filled with extraordinary photography and thoughtful writing. But attention to detail is where this site excels.

Every Olympic sport has its own page, where writers explain the background and strategy of the events and profile the most promising contenders.

And for kids, there is no better Olympic site than the SI For Kids section. Kids are given a chance to ask questions about sports. There’s a gallery of kid sports drawings that features a super drawing of Red Wing Sergei Fedorov by 10-year-old Jon Billak of Brunswick, Ohio. There is also a handful of interactive elements, like the page that allows you to find out which sports personalities share your birthday.

(http://pathfinder.com/@@Dco4oQYAcO9HdKuc/si/athens/olyhome.html)

Other big sites are worth wandering into only for some of their more entertaining offerings. NationsBank (http://www.96games.com/history/index.htm) offers visitors a chance to send online Olympic postcards, while NBC (http://www.olympic.nbc.com) details the rules of every event.

Also well worth your time are delectably teeny and useful sites like the one sponsored by the Halifax Aqua Nova Synchronized Swimming Club (http://service.iotek.ns.ca/han/hanpage.html), which offers up a concise photographic guide to the intricacies of its much misunderstood sport. Or the Volleyball site (http://www.volleyball.org/index.html) or the Judo site (http://www.rain.org/ssa/judo.htm), both of which are glutted with handy background information.