Four days and counting ... Only last week, FPM blogger Chris Chase complained that it was hard to find much in the way of Olympic preview material at the newsstand. Fret no more, Double-Cee, the Beijing Games hype machine is out of the blocks clean and has hit its stride. By Friday, this thing will have gathered more momentum than Boys' Life cover boy Jeremy Wariner at the 300 meter mark. The only way it could get any bigger would be if Brett Favre and Manny Ramirez entered the badminton competition as a doubles team. Then we might actually see Chris Mortensen's head explode. Which would probably become a game show in Japan, if it is not already.

For example, take a look at yesterday's New York Times Play Magazine Olympics edition - all 76 pages of it. And these are those NYT Mag size pages, as big as ESPN the Magazine, only with paragraph after paragraph of sentences written in English instead of translated text messages printed in video game graphic fonts. Who edited this thing?

As I watched yet another hour of Brett Favre coverage on television last night, an interesting question popped into my head.

If you could bring one former U.S. Olympian out of retirement and allow them to compete in Beijing, who would it be?

I decided that I would only consider athletes who have participated since the '92 Games in Barcelona because most people my age (24) don't remember anything before that. For the purposes of this argument though, if an athlete in this poll competed in an Olympics before Barcelona, those stats will be recognized.

Let's get to the choices ...

Michael Jordan-- Basketball ('84 L.A., '92 Barcelona)

Jordan led the U.S.A. basketball team to two gold medals, becoming one of only three people to win a gold medal as an amateur and a professional (Mullin and Ewing).

Carl Lewis-- Track and Field ('84 L.A., '88 Seoul, '92 Barcelona, '96 Atlanta)

Lewis earned nine gold medals, and one silver, over a long and distinguished career. He is widely considered to be

Every four years, the world is captivated as the best soccer players gather for a tournament to determine global soccer supremecy. And two years after that, some kids play in the Olympics to a much more apathetic worldwide reaction. Why aren't the Olympics as big as the World Cup?

The easy answer is, because FIFA won't let it happen. When the World Cup was created in 1930, FIFA didn't want the Olympics to overshadow its marquee event, so the event was dropped for the '32 Games. When soccer returned at the Berlin Olympics in 1936, it was as an amateur event. It stayed that way until 1984, when the IOC wanted professionals to return but, wary of European and South American dominance, instead instituted a rule that forced teams from those continents to only use players who had not previously played in a World Cup. All other nations were allowed to use whomever they wanted. (Even with the restrictions, France won the gold in 1984.)

Today, Olympic soccer is essentially an under-23 event

Christmas has the tree. Hanukkah has the menorah. The Olympics has the David Robinson/Scottie Pippen air mattress.

Thanks to the wonder of Ebay, you could be laying on top of Scottie Pippen or the Admiral:

This is an air mattress measuring appx. 4' long X 2 1/2' wide. There is a slow leak so the mattress does NOT hold air for very long. There are no evident holes, so perhaps it could be patched or used as wall poster. The mattress is made from thick plastic with Lays and Pippin on one side and Doritos and Robinson on the other. Also their signatures and the USA Dream Team Olympic Logo. the plastic has misc scratches and red marks from storage and is in good condition. There are holds in the plastic border at the top.

An air mattress for sale that has a hole in it you say? Sign me up! Maybe I could also get my hands on that Tiger Woods replica driver I've always wanted. It's missing the club-head, but I could still swing it around and maybe hang it on the wall as a memento of

The official website of nine-time Olympic gold medalist Carl Lewis, CarlLewis.com, is like a model house. It looks impressive enough on the outside, but when you start poking around you realize that nothing works and the TV is made of plastic.

CarlLewis.com is filled with videos, bios, blogs that haven't been updated since January 2007 and pictures of Carl Lewis is various states of dress and undress. It's pretty much everything you wouldn't want your official website to be. Clearly, Lewis and his people once hired someone to create a nice, easy-to-navigate site, but then lost interest, stopped performing updates and allowed it to fall into a state of hilarious neglect.

Here's the link; I highly - HIGHLY - recommend taking a few minutes out of your day and browsing around the site. I never like following tour guides at museums, preferring to explore on my own. I recommend you do the same here, as CarlLewis.com can mean so many things to so many different people. But whatever you do,

A few links to get your day going ...

Forget about the smog, the traffic problems in Beijing may turn out to be one of the biggest stories of these Games. Can you imagine driving in this? [Guardian]

Thanks to my FPM colleague Maggie Hendricks for passing along this great post about all the Olympic songs since 1976. I don't remember any of these though. [Rings]

Jessica Hardy is still sad after being kicked off the U.S. swim team. Who wouldn't be? So she did what anybody would do to try and feel better ... went to Coldstone and had an ice cream. [Press-Telegram]

The U.S. women's basketball team thumped Becky Hammon and Russia earlier this morning. [AP]

An interesting read about how far the Games have come technology-wise over the last 40 years. [LA Times]

I knew these protests in China weren't going to end well. [AP]

The Beijing Olympics will be the 29th Games of the modern Olympiad. And while these Olympics are much larger in scale than anything the ancient Olympians could have dreamed of, this revival has a long way to go if it wants to match the old-time Greeks for longevity.

There were 293 editions of the ancient Olympics, running from 776 B.C. to 393 A.D., or 1,169 years. To put that in perspective, this version of the Olympics would have to last until 3064 to equal the run of the first Games. I'm sure Dara Torres already has her calendar circled.

What events will they have at the 3064 Olympics, I wonder? I see it going in one of two directions. Events could be purely technologically based, like '100-meter hoverboard' (in which the winner will be Marty McFly XXIII) or 'shuttle run to the moon'. Or, if the sobering lessons of Terminator 2 come to fruition, technology will be viewed as evil and our society will have regressed to the point where the final modern Olympics looks like the first

My hope is that I don't look like this after a month of Olympic blogging.

This guy just looks exhausted.

This picture was taken in the Workers' Gymnasium in Beijing.

This worker's shoes are off but he's still got his bag hanging around his arm. If I had been this guy I would have at least lined up a row of chairs so that I could have slepped on my back.

As always put your caption ideas down below ...

After the jump you'll find a list of C-a-C winners from the last week.

First off, I'd like to personally acknowledge commenter "The SOS" who provided at least one caption idea for every picture. We need everybody to get involved this week.

Monday--Lisa Leslie keeps an eye out for Rick Mahorn

1st--The SOS

"We get new uniforms for the Olympics, right? A little less Richard Simmons, a little more Uncle Sam?"

Tuesday--The Olympic Mini Me

1st--The SOS

"One World, One Dream, Two Thumbs!"

Wednesday--The poster child of the Beijing Olympics

1st--biazinazn

"Now let's see which country will help