KEY POINTS:
As the man with the Fu Man Chu moustache and the woman with the slicked-back bleach blond hair strode into the room, the clicking of camera shutters was deafening.
And that was just the start of this five-ring circus.
Before every Olympic Games, there are some press conferences which are spectacles in themselves. To that end, yesterday's United States swim team media event was a beaut.
Michael Phelps, sporting new facial hair, and Dara Torres, the fastest forty-something on water, fronted up to 800 international journalists, facing some probing questions and others which were just downright weird.
Michael, have you calculated how many seconds slower the moustache will make you? (Okay, so that question was more in jest than weird, but you get the point. The answer, by the way, was no. He did have a good laugh though).
There was a fair bit of absurdity. Everyone in the world knows Phelps is gunning for eight victories, a feat which would better countryman Mark Spitz's record seven gold bag in 1972. But Phelps pretended like it was some sort of secret.
"You guys are the ones who are talking about it, I'm not saying anything," he said. "I'm just going out to try and do what I want to do. My goals have not been made public - Bob [Bowman, his coach] and I are the only ones who know them."
Torres, a five-time Olympian and the grand old lady of swimming, was asked what it was like to be the face for the "40, fit and fierce" generation.
"I just want to go out there for those 40-somethings and show them age is just a number," she said.
But it was not all hilarity. There were poignant moments too, particularly when Torres was asked about her coach, Michael Lohberg, who is battling a rare and potentially fatal blood disease.
Right now, she said, doctors were trying to figure out why his body was rejecting blood transfusions.
A swimmer on the US team, Eric Shanteau, is also fighting testicular cancer.
Lohberg and Shanteau's plights highlight the fact that as big as the Olympics are, they're not a matter of life and death - they're just a big sporting festival. Or a circus.
