Already and this is this is the daily This is the Daily. Ohs oh, now it makes sense. Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Friday, the twenty sixth of July. I'm Sam, I'm Zara. It is the final countdown. The twenty twenty four Paris Olympics opening ceremony is this weekend. In today's podcast, I'm going to guide
you through a traditional pre exam cram session. What you need to know to get up to speed right now so that you deliver a gold medal performance in what I think is the most hotly contested sport of watching as much Olympics as you possibly can before we get there, though. Here's what's making headlines.
Two helicopter pilots have died after a mid air collision in WA's Kimberly region. WA Police said two helicopters, which were being used to herd cattle, crash shortly after taking off, claiming the lives of a twenty nine and a thirty year old man. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau is now investigating. The incident comes after an Italian military aircraft crashed in a remote part of the NT yesterday after participating in
an international defense drill. The pilot ejected himself from the plane while flying and was treated for injuries in a Darwin hospital.
Two federal senior cabinet ministers have announced their stepping down. Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney and Skills Minister Brendan O'Connor will both leave their portfolios immediately and have announced they won't contest the next election. They're the first two people to quit Prime Minister Anthony Alberanze's cabinet since Labor won the election back in twenty twenty two. The move has triggered a reshuffle on the front bench, which will be unveiled on Sunday.
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has delivered an address to the US Congress where he said America and Israel must stand together. Yahu said he was confident that hostages taken by Humas on the seventh of October can be returned. The presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and current President Joe Biden did not attend the address. Netaniahu's address triggered mass protests both inside and outside the Capitol, with protesters calling for an end to the war in Gaza.
And today's good news. A breakthrough test for the deadly infection sepsis could speed up diagnoses and possibly save lives. Sepsis can be a life threatening condition where the human body's infection fighting processes backfire, turning on the vital organs
instead of the viruses one sepsis has set in. It can lead to a person's death within twelve hours, but researchers from Soul's National University in South Korea have found a new method to diagnose sepsis within thirteen hours, cutting down the detection window by a potentially life saving amount of time.
I'm almost more excited for the Olympics to begin, not for the sport itself, but because you've been speaking about this every single day for nearly a year, and I'm excited for you.
I can hardly stay still in my chair that excited. I would say that this is my Olympics, but it is. This is my Olympics.
Excellent starting off with the Dad Joe. For people that perhaps aren't as excited as you are, are more getting across the excitement day by day. Let's start with the basics. How can anyone that's listening actually follow the Olympics from Australia.
So if you're a casual fan and you just want to have a touch point with the Olympics once a day where you can understand what's big, what's happening, what time you need to turn on the TV, who's winning medals. This is not me being biased, but I would sign up to the TDA Sport newsletter. We're going to be doing a special Olympics edition every day with.
Every single day.
Yeah, with all of those key details, it's going to take a couple of minutes to read. We're also going to be doing two special afternoon editions of this podcast each week of the games to make sure that our podcast listeners are up to speed as well. But for those with a bit more time and investment, perhaps passion for the Olympics, you're going to spend a lot of time on Channel nine. They've got the official broadcast rights
of the game. They paid three hundred and five million dollars for the rights to Paris and then the next two Summer Olympics and two Winter Olympics, so that takes us to Brisbane and the Paralympics two in a separate deal. So nine are going to broadcast the games on freeware TV and the coverage is going to be on their main channel and on nine GEM. And what that means is that if you don't have pay television or digital television.
Which we have spoken about before on as point we.
Have covered that, then your TV aerial will serve you just fine. But we also know that there's an increasing portion of Australians, particularly young Australians, who don't have a TV plugged into a TV aerial. Some don't even have traditional TVs, and that's where nine Now and STAN are going to come in for all of the digital streaming.
I'm really good at watching TV. I'm less good at staying up late, which I don't think will serve me well for these games. What are the times we're talking about with some of these Olympic.
Events, Well, this is key primetime viewing, and by primetime I mean probably the worst possible time for Australians to wake up. So the opening ceremony, for example, that's kicking off tonight, and by tonight I mean four am Saturday morning. That is known in the sporting community as the single worst time to start an event because there's not like a two am where then you can go to sleep after it's not the six.
Am you're awaken tied for the rest of the day.
It's pretty crap, but it's the Olympics and if they can set new world records and everything, then we can get up and have a bit less sleep.
And so for those who are braving the four am wake up tomorrow morning for the opening ceremony, what can they expect from that?
So you and Mr spoke this week about some of the more serious aspects, the security and the logistics. I'll focus on perhaps the fun stuff fun.
Yeah, Sam drops in once a week to deliver the daily fun Disney Dad.
Instead of being held in a stadium, this ceremony is going to be taking place on the River Send and that's significant for two reasons. It's going to be the biggest live audience ever for an opening ceremony of an Olympics. They're expecting a few hundred thousand people to line the banks of the river, and obviously you can't do that in the stadium because it doesn't have the capacity to do that. It's also the first time though the majority of spectators are going to be there for free, and
they're going to see quite a spectacle. They're going to see a massive convoy of boats carrying athletes and performers down the river, and it's the six kilometer stretch that actually goes past landmarks like the Affel Tower, the Louver and Notre Dame Cathedral.
I have vivid memories of the Spy Skills performing at the London opening ceremony. I don't know that we're getting the Spy Skills again, but who knows. What are we expecting from the opening ceremony performance.
One of the really cool parts of the Olympics is that we typically only find out who's the headline performer of the opening ceremony when they pop up, normally in the middle of the stadium. In this case, they're going to pop up on the boat. And there's always this crazy rumor game. So the lead rumors for who's going to perform is Celendion and Lady Gaga. They've both been spotted in Paris in the last few days.
I just watched Celendion's documentary.
Maybe she's doing a bit of a press tour, yeah, maybe. Then. We've also heard rumors about Aya Nakamura. She's the most streamed French singer in the world. Then there's some wild rumors about Taylor Swift, who has a mysterious gap in the Eras tour that fits just perfectly around an appearance at the opening ceremony. Nothing's going to quite hit Nicky Webster and Vanessa Amirosi. But I think this kind of combination I might tip Celendi on they'll go okay, okay.
So we're expecting a spectacle from that opening ceremony. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. That's just the first day. I want to move on to the actual games itself and Australia's metal hopes. There are we expecting to do well as a country at this Olympic Games.
Well, there's some really high hopes on the Australian team and that's kind of being driven by the Australian Olympic Committee it's self, the organization that represents the athletes gets them ready for the Games. I did a podcast about how much money is being sunk into winning gold. I'll put it in the show notes. But the pressure is on. So in Tokyo we finished sixth on the medal table. We won seventeen golds. The pressure is on us to
go better this year. Our best games in terms of the number of gold medals was Athens in two thousand and four. That's where we won seventeen golds and sixteen silvers, and that just pips Tokyo, where it was seventeen and seven silvers.
I presume a large portion of those golds come from swimming, which were as a country are very good at doing. Right.
It's almost the national sport at the moment. You know, there is such a presence of how good Australia is in international media. I was listening to a Washington Post Olympics preview this week and they'd spend more time talking about the Australian swimmers than they did about the American swimmers. So the whole world's watching a lot of the kind of predictions of how we're going to go. Says that the swimmers will account for sixty to seventy percent of
our medals. We've got around Tiitmas trying to defend her two hundred and four hundred style titles. Kaylee McEwen is a force to be reckoned with in backstroke, but I'm also excited about some of the young talent like Molly O'Callahan and Sam short.
One of my problems in watching the Olympics is that I deeply care about the swimming, and that once the swimming is over, I feel a bit lost.
Oh yes, the second half tumble.
We call it what happens after the swimming. Where do we get our gold medals from after that?
Oh? Mate, it's just beginning. So we've got the women's soccer team, the Matilda's, you might be familiar with them. They're going to be looking to build on their success from last year's World Cup. They could get gold if things go well. The men's rugby sevens team is targeting gold. Jessica Fox is an amazing canoeist. She's targeting.
She's our flag bear.
She's our flag bearer tomorrow morning. She's targeting two gold medals in her events. And then I'm just going to go through the other medal hopes super quick because there are so many. We've got Grace Brown looking good in road cycling, Logan Martin in the BMX, he will defend his gold medal he won in Tokyo. And in the athletics. Keep an eye on Nina Kennedy in the pole vault and nikola Oli Sanger's in the high jump. She wants silver in Tokyo. Then we've got the Kokabaras, the Australian
men's hockey team and the Australian women's rugby sevens. They're both hot favorites in their competitions. And I have not even mentioned basketball, skateboarders, sailors, rowers, Alex Demonor and the tennis surfers, golfers, boxes shooter as water power weightlifter is a questra in triathlon, diving and beach volleyball. And I guarantee you in that list there'll be some surprises.
Okay, I think I get the picture. There's a lot, and you're not breathing.
I'll speak to you in three weeks.
But lots of excellent chances that Australia is up for any number of medals and lots of excitement there. One of the things I'm really looking forward to is breaking, which I have learned is not break dancing. It's breaking.
Yes, the cool kids are calling it breaking. This is a new sport at the Olympics. It's going to be awesome to watch. So the competitors are known as bee boys and be girls and they'll face off in these one on one dance battles and they'll showcase their best moves. It kind of feels like a gymnastics floor routine in some ways, like the same level of athleticism and power is on display to really cool music, amazing costumes. I'm super excited to watch that. It's not the only thing
that's changing, though. We've got sport climbing, and that debuted in Tokyo, but that's now got two separate events, a combined category of bouldering, which I know is very popular as a pastime here in Australia and lead and there's also a speed climbing where you just have to get to the top as quick as you can. Then there's also kiteboarding and sailing and a new variation in canoeing called kayak cross.
It's always interesting to understand this modernization and trying to keep up with new sports as they arise and certainly as they are considered Olympic events. But what I did find interesting is that breaking won't be included in the next Games in LA so they've introduced it in time for this but then not again at the next Games.
The selection of sports by the International Olympic Committee can be really political, and they're often thinking for eight twelve years ahead, and sometimes what they'll do is introduce a sport and say it's a one year activity that doesn't necessarily all it out for the next one where they can do a bit of back by popular demand. It kind of gives it room to be dropped off if it's not a success.
I now feel successfully caught up on everything I need to know ahead of the Olympics beginning. Thank you, Sam. And if you're looking for a cheat sheet to the Olympics every single day, sign up to our sport newsletter. As I mentioned on the podcast earlier this week. It is written by our team and just gives you everything you need to know about the Olympics and the rest of the sport in the world. We'll throw that link
in today's show notes. Have a great weekend, watch the Olympics and go Australia.
My name is Lily Madden and I'm a proud Arunda Bungelung Kalgoton woman from Gadighl Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.