Archive for the 'Bocce Ball' Category
Opening ceremony
Main article: 2008 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony
The opening ceremony of the Olympics in Beijing will be held in the Beijing National Stadium, and begin at 8:00pm CST (12:00 UTC) on 8 August 2008. It has been announced that Canada’s Celine Dion and Taiwan’s Jay Chou would perform during the opening ceremony.
On July 21, NBC announced the Opening Ceremony would include performances by a cast of 15,000 and declared it would be the most spectacular Olympics Opening Ceremony ever produced.
Sports
This pictogram depicts Athletics.
Medals of the 2008 Summer Olympics: silver (left), gold (center), bronze (right)
The program for the Beijing 2008 Games is quite similar to that of the Athens Games held in 2004. The 2008 Olympics will see the return of 28 sports, and will hold 302 events (165 men’s events, 127 women’s events, and 10 mixed events), one event more in total than in Athens.
Overall 9 new events will be held, which include 2 from the new cycling discipline of BMX. Women will compete in the 3000 m steeplechase for the first time. In addition, marathon swimming events for men and women, over the distance of 10 kilometres, will be added to the swimming discipline. Team events (men and women) in table tennis will replace the doubles events. In fencing, women’s team foil and women’s team sabre will replace men’s team foil and women’s team epee.
The Beijing Organizing Committee have released pictograms of the 35 Olympic disciplines. This set of sport icons is named the beauty of seal characters, due to each pictogram’s likeness to Chinese seal script.
The following are the sports to be contested at these Games. The number of events to be contested in each sport is indicated in parentheses.
Written in part with Wikipedia:
PLAYING THE ITALIAN GAME OF BOCCE BALL
Bocce is played with four or eight large Bocce balls and one smaller target or object ball called the pallino or jack. There are 2 or 4 balls to a side, or team, and they are made in two colors to distinguish the balls of one team from the balls of the opposing team.
The pallino (object ball) is thrown out by a member of the team having won the coin toss to start the game. The same player throwing the pallino must deliver the first bocce ball. The opposing team will then deliver their bocce balls until the point is taken or they have exhausted their 4 balls. This “nearest ball” rule governs the sequence of the thrown balls. The side whose bocce is the closest to the pallino is called the “in” ball and the opposing side the “out” ball. After all balls have been played, the game “frame” is concluded and only one team is awarded one point for each of its balls that are closer to the pallino than the closest ball of the opposing team. A team, then, may score up to a maximum of four points a frame. If no team’s ball is closer to the pallino (each is an equal distance away), no points are awarded for the frame. Often there is a measuring device present on the court’s sidelines in order to assist you with this judgement.
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