Doin' Olympics

One interesting thing about Japan that you just sort of have to find out is that they're pretty good about knowing professional athletes' names.  In America, there's a certain group of athletes whose names we may remember for about a month every four years when the Olympics come up, but that's it.  Track and field guys, swimmers, volleyball players -- those sorts of people are only familiar to Americans for a very short time at best.  However, my host family was very surprised that I didn't know the name of some runner that was on TV a few days ago, and even more surprised that most of America doesn't, either.  He was American, so they thought it was odd that we have no idea who he is.  The average Japanese person could probably do a better job telling me who is going to be in London this year than anyone back home could, which is just kind of funny.  For some reason they care about those sorts of athletes over here much more than we do.