It begins...

It's day 3 of the Olympics. I'm not yet running on fumes. The adrenaline of the games is keeping me energized.

Four of my six sports have started. Since I have only smaller profile sports and none of them are team sports, it can be dizzying trying to keep up with every canoe race and boxing match. Luckily I have a lot of tv monitors and a chair that swivels.

Yesterday, fencer Alexander Massialas won a silver medal, the first individual fencing medal for a U.S. male in 32 years and the first in that particular discipline in 104 years. These kind of stories make the long days all worth it.

And it's not just the Americans we research. It's the judo athlete from Kosovo who won her country's first medal in any sport - in the country's first ever Olympics after declaring independence in 2009.

If you're watching the Olympics and the color analyst drops an obscure stat or personal story about the athlete, chances are that info was provided to them by the research room, where I reside. We are like human Wikipedia, except hopefully a bit more credible.

Olympic vocabulary:
ippon - like a knockout in boxing, but in judo
parry riposte - to deflect and counter strike in fencing
second - any coach/trainer/hypeman in your corner in boxing
taekwondo - Korean for "the way of hand and foot"
par terre position - starting on your hands and knees in wrestling, if penalized