Opening Ceremonies

March to the medals: Blaine Wilson finished with a strong performance on the rings to win the national gymnastics championship in Knoxville, Tenn. Wilson scored a 9.8 on the rings to beat defending champion John Roethlisberger for the overall title.Carrying the torch: The Olympic torch moved through Ohio yesterday en route to the Atlanta Games. Spectators lined both sides of U.S. 22 as the torch passed through the village of Morrow, about 20 miles north of Cincinnati.Final exams: Terry Brands and Kevin Jackson earned spots in today's finals of the U.S. freestyle wrestling trials.

The grand opening of the Anne Arundel County Court House, which has been open for two months, will be held at 4 p.m. Dec. 12, followed by a small reception and open house that will allow area court and elected officials to tour the Annapolis building.There will probably be other grand openings. An additional 110,000 square feet of space, mostly for administrative offices of the Circuit Court, is to be built.Also, the restoration of the tiny original 1824 courthouse to its 1890s appearance began recently.

The TV Repairman:It's probably a good move, CBS starting its Winter Olympics coverage tomorrow night (8-11) with hockey and skiing action accompanying the opening ceremonies. The pomp and circumstance of teams parading into a stadium is OK for a while, but becomes tiresome quickly.The Sunday morning fare, beginning at 9, includes the start of the hockey competition, gold-medal favorite Sweden taking on Slovakia, some speed skating, figure skating (pairs) and the women's 15K cross country skiing.

You can take Michael Phelps out of Baltimore. You can send him to his fourth Olympics. But what does he do during his downtime? "I've just been watching 'The Wire,'" Phelps said Wednesday, referring to the HBO show that is perhaps as famous a Baltimore export as he is. "I know, I never felt the need to watch it before because it was five minutes from where I live. " He'll be watching more TV on Friday night, but it will be the opening ceremonies for his final Games. Despite being the veritable face of the Olympics after his last two Games, he's never marched with the other athletes to open the quadrennial competition because the swimming events begin the following morning.

Driven by gold for Michael Phelps and the women gymnastics team, NBC's prime-time coverage of the Summer Olympics Tuesday hit a new high in overnight ratings topping those earned by the record-setting opening ceremonies. And maybe it's me, but the complaints in social media didn't seem quite as loud yesterday. Or, maybe they were just drowned out by Phelps becoming the most decorated athlete in Olympics history. I know I saw both Phelps events and some of the women gymnastics on live stream in real time Tuesday afternoon, but still wound up watching the tape-delay version through prime time.

NBC's Friday-night coverage of the opening ceremonies of the London Olympics drew the largest TV audience on record for a kickoff of the summer games. According to Nielsen figures provided by NBC, 40.7 million average viewers watched the four-hour-plus telecast, outpacing the Atlanta game by 900,000 viewers while topping Beijing by 6 million and Athens by 15 million. NBC's coverage was the highest-rated Friday night on any U.S. network in a decade. Read my review calling the coverage a "winner" here . Meanwhile, a mostly-media-made mini-flap flared when some in the British press criticized NBC for cutting three minutes of opening ceremonies out of the taped-delay version shown to American viewers in favor of an NBC interview with Michael Phelps.

In support of the Special Olympics Maryland Summer Games to be held tomorrow night through Sunday at the University of Maryland, College Park, state and local law enforcement officers will run a torch relay through Carroll County tomorrow morning. Starting about 9 a.m. on Route 26 at the Frederick County line, members of the Westminster barracks of the Maryland State Police and Carroll County Sheriff's Office and the Westminster Police Department will carry the Special Olympics torch east to Route 27 and north to city police headquarters in Westminster, said 1st Sgt. Dean Richardson, a police spokesman for the event.

Now that the NFL has officially returned to Baltimore, Ravens owner Art Modell plans to follow through on the slogan from the 1993 expansion campaign and "Give Baltimore The Ball."Two fans were selected at random to receive game balls before tomorrow night's exhibition opener against the Philadelphia Eagles. The fans will accept the balls from Modell and his family on behalf of Baltimore, team spokesman Kevin Byrne said.Mark D'Anna, 35, of Perry Hall was selected from among the season ticket holders.

BEIJING - Just when it seemed that nothing good could pierce the gloomy, gray haze that stifles this city, just when the U.S. Olympic Committee set the bar of foolishness and political expediency higher than any gold medalist will ever jump, a story comes along to remind the world that the Olympics still have great redemptive power. The captains of the U.S. teams participating in the Beijing Games yesterday chose 1,500-meter runner Lopez Lomong, a Sudanese refugee who was abducted from his church at age 6 and targeted for a life as a child soldier, to carry the American flag into the opening ceremony tomorrow.