Expats search for home-country heroes

From the Irish pubs of Stockholm to bustling Koreatown in Los Angeles, expat Olympic fans around the world are following - or trying to follow - their favourite back-home athletes, an often lonely and difficult pursuit in our otherwise connected world.

"Watching the Olympics from here is weird for me," said Beto Capon, a 25-year-old call centre worker from Mexico City who has been living in Israel for four years.

At Mike's Place, a popular hangout in downtown Jerusalem where the American, British and Canadian flags fly alongside that of Israel, Capon took in women's swimming. He still roots for Mexico when the Olympics roll around.

"Here I don't have fans to share the experience with," he said.

Steve McCready, 52, was jollier at Dubliner's in central Stockholm for the boxing match between Ireland and Germany.

Fifteen years in Sweden, the construction worker is soaking up six to seven hours a day of the London Games thanks to the pub's satellite TV and the company of fellow Irishmen. Irish badminton? He was watching.

"Of course, you want to follow your home country. If Ireland is competing you want to see them, especially if they do well," McCready said last Thursday.

Not bothered

But he's not bothered by the Olympic-viewing eccentricities of his adopted Sweden.

"You have to accept that in any country you're living in, they will concentrate on their own teams and favourite sports," he said. "Take handball, for example. The Swedes love it, so there's going to be a lot of that."

Aside from pubs and satellite dishes, some sports fans far from their homelands are resorting to video online, thanks to healthy bandwidth and programmes like the Expat Shield, which helps users hide their IP addresses to bypass restrictions on who has legal permission to show the games - and where.

James Bosworth, an American blogger living in Managua, Nicaragua, could use some help.

He can watch the games on his local Claro cable TV provider and even some NBC programming, but he can't review the day's video online at his leisure.

"I go to NBC's page, I'm blocked. I go to BBC, I'm blocked. I go to CCTV, I'm blocked," he said. "And when Claro TV's cable went down for four days I was left without anything."

Staring intently at his laptop, 49-year-old Joon Ha of Sherman Oaks, Califronia, watched the finals of sports South Korea is competitive in - judo, fencing, shooting, archery - via downloads from Korean television websites.

NBC's coverage out of London hasn't included many Korean athletes, but that doesn't upset him.

"The United States is a very big country, and it's understandable that there are so many games they compete in that having the games of this one country on television will occupy all the programming," he said.

Sore subject

That's a sore subject with British expats who were outraged when the BBC blocked non-UK users from accessing Web streams of some popular radio programmes because of International Olympic Committee rights demands.

After a deluge of complaints, the BBC announced that it had negotiated with the IOC to allow non-UK users access to all but a few Web streams. The reasoning: Although the shows do feature Olympic content, it isn't broadcast live and makes up a minority of programming.

Ironically, if you're in a country where the IOC didn't sell exclusive rights to broadcast the games, you stand a better chance of being able to watch the events you're interested in than if you're in countries like France, Japan or Mexico where it did. That's because the IOC is providing its own free YouTube live stream of the games in 64 nations across Asia and Africa.

German native Rosmari Pernisz, a retired teacher in Midland, Michigan, has lived stateside for more than 30 years. She's not an avid sports fan but does like watching Olympic gymnastics and soccer.

"There are endless interviews with American athletes and shots of their faces and all of their parents and so forth. It's all about Americans," she said of the NBC coverage. "It doesn't matter what I am. I would like to see things from all over the world."