The flurry of finals events in the past couple of days has provided tons of excitement and tons of medals as well, giving the USA a huge boost in the medal count after being led by China in just about every category for the first few days of the games.
Going into Friday, the Americans have finally caught up and are in the medal count lead with 37 overall medals, while China now has only 34. The Americans have also caught up in total golds won, both they and China currently have 18 top medals -- the Americans can thank a huge boost from Thursday's swimming competitions for their sudden jump in that category.
A full medal count tracker from SportsIllustrated can be found here.
Track and field events begin on Friday, with soccer, water polo and others providing plenty of quarter and semi-final events during the course of the day. 27 different events are seeing their finals on Friday, with several more swimming finals in the books -- something that should be of great interest to the Americans. The full schedule for the Olympics on Friday can be found here.
As per usual, you can see the games live on NBColympics.com, assuming that you fit their qualifications to access their stream services. The games will also be shown on tape delay on the entire NBC network of channels on television.
For more coverage of local athletes at this year's games, stay with this StoryStream. Be sure to check out SB Nation's 2012 Olympics hub for more London Games news and analysis.