Beware Geeks Bearing Gifts.

Without going into an elaborate recap of the origins of the Olympics, I thought I'd show you a few of the characters I've acquired over the years.

Up first would be the founder of the Olympics, Zeus.











Now comes the time where I make up a whole lot of facts just to justify scans of really goofy pictures. Therefore we have 6 of the Greek Gods responsible for the games (citation needed.) I have translated these from the Japanese (who took their language-version from the original Greek, so cut them some slack) thus some variation between this and your childhood knowledge may occur.

Starting upper left and going clockwise, Aporon アポロン, Zeusu ゼウス, Poseidon ポセイドン, Afurodaichi アフロダィチ and Sentauros センタウロス and Atena アテナ. (I assume you can figure out their English-language counterparts as: Apollo, Zeus, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Centaurus and Athena.)






In case you hadn't noticed over the last few weeks and ending Monday, there was some minor sporting event going on in China. I thought I'd give you my choice for the modern day equivalents of the above gods. Since Apollo is primarily a god of light and the sun, music, poetry, and other artistic endeavours, the only sport he was involved in was Archery. So let's go with this year's Gold Medal winner, Viktor Ruban of the Ukraine.

Next up, we have Zeus. Since one of his symbols is a Thunderbolt, who better to choose than Usain Bolt of Jamaica.



Poseidon of course has to be represented by the new Aquaman, Michael Phelps.

Here is a close up of Aphrodite surfing half a shell. Since she is the Goddess of love, lust, beauty, and sexual reproduction, there isn't any real Sporty equivalent. So I'll just randomly choose some Japanese woman winner. It definitely won't be Saori Yoshida, so how about Emiko Suzuki?

Japan has other ideas of who is beautiful as this attests:



We'll let our Centaur friend as spokesperson for the Equestrian events, so let's choose a fellow Canadian, Eric Lamaze.

Finally, it's hard to figure out a specific sport associated with Athena, so I'll just leave you with some Stormtroopers: