London 2012 Olympics close with spectacular ceremony

'The London 2012 Olympics have ended with a spectacular musical closing ceremony and the official handover to the next host city, Rio de Janeiro.

The three-hour show featured some of the biggest names of British pop from decades past, including the Spice Girls, George Michael and Elbow. Games chief Lord Coe said: "When our time came - Britain, we did it right."

The official Games flag was handed to the mayor of Rio before the flame at the Olympic Stadium was extinguished.

President of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge, who declared the Games of the 30th Olympiad closed just before midnight, said: "We will never forget the smiles, the kindness and the support of the wonderful volunteers, the much-needed heroes of these Games. "You, the spectators and the public, provided the soundtrack for these Games. "Your enthusiastic cheers energised its competitors and brought a festive spirit to every Olympic venue."

At the close of the ceremony, watched in the stadium by the 10,000 athletes and 80,000 spectators, the flame was extinguished in dramatic fashion. Each nation will receive one of the cauldron's 204 petals.

As fireworks went off above the east London stadium, the Who performed My Generation and the venue became a sea of red, white and blue confetti.

The finale, which began with Big Ben chiming, paid tribute to UK music, fashion and culture.'

After watching our American team surpass all others in the medal count, I was thinking of how Obama might address the athletes. Based on some things he’s said in the past, here’s what I came up with:

Obama’s Address to the American Olympic Athletes

There are a lot of strong, successful American Olympians who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’re a great athlete, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I dedicated my life to this sport. There are a lot of people who dedicated their lives to something. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great coach somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to win that gold medal. Somebody invested in running tracks and gymnasiums. If you go to the pool — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The uneven bars didn’t get invented on their own. Government research created the uneven bars so that all the gymnasts could spin around real fast on them.

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like playing basketball, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own basketball court. That would be a hard way to play a game of b-ball.

Don’t take the comments personally, scotsman.

I remember the Brits poking fun at Olympics ceremonies in the U.S. They would laugh about the U.S. being so flashy. So my family was curious to see what London would do. It was interesting to see just as much flash and bling, if not more of it, in the London ceremony.

With that said, the ceremony might have been better than what American viewers were permitted to see because NBC cut out so much of it: For the closing ceremony, the network cut out the performances by Muse and the Who, for example. More importantly, for the opening ceremony, NBC cut the tribute to the victims of the 7/7 bombing. In fact, some people were wondering why the ceremony did not include a tribute to victims of terrorist attacks... It turns out, the ceremony most certainly did include one, but the network cut it.

I didn’t watch more than few minutes of closing, but I felt NBC did a better job covering the actual events, than any recent games coverage.

In the future, for Olympics and other sports events, I would like to see competition, not monopoly.

For example, how about a channel devoted entirely to track & field? Over streaming internet.

Netflix works amazingly well, so I see a future for sports broadcasts along those lines.

BTW in my area NBC is over the air HD, so the BEST coverage was by antenna, not costly cable.

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