Yeah, the more I watch Chinese athletes, the less I think they should be allowed at the Olympics. I don't know exactly how we phrase the rule to disallow that bullshit - but the Olympics should be for the love of the sport - not for the love of profit and bullshit politics.
As the polar opposite of the complaints about the athletes poorly representing the US, we have Harper and Wells being interviewed after their silver and bronze for the 100 meter hurdles. Completely charming.
Cmon now, we cannot have Asians ruining well established stereotypes can we? What next, champion African swimming teams?
I thought the same thing right after. Its fun to see people being happy they medaled at all. Harper is the defending champ and she was super pumped with her finish. It was refreshing. In a way its awesome that the American Olympic program is successful enough that Golds can be expected. But at the same time, being second in the world at any sport is not so bad.
The coverage of the weightlifting here is doing a bit of a spotlight on Salimi (the super heavyweight gold medalist, 6'6 and 360lbs) - they're saying that he wanted to be a gymnast. The mental image of that guy doing artistic floor work is going to be burned into my brain for a while.
By the way, if you guys like the marriage of politics and quadrennial sports, this Twitter feed is hilarious (and not mine): <a class="postlink" href="https://twitter.com/RafalcaRomney" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">https://twitter.com/RafalcaRomney</a>
Saw that yesterday, but got distracted by the Canadian Women's Soccer bullshit. I missed the game - did anyone see this? I keep reading conflicting articles on exactly what happened. Edited to add: I don't get it. If he knew he was going to test positive - why did he bother?
There are 3 things I know for certain about Canada from that game. 1) Christine Sinclair is an absolute beast and almost single handily won that game. 2) The better team won. Simple as that. Canada got away with a ton of physical play and while they think the calls leading to the PK were bad, Alex Morgan and Wambach both got brutally taken down in the box 2-3 other times which went uncalled. Leading to my next point... 3) Melissa Tancredi is a dirty bitch. How she didn't get a second yellow is beyond me. She was the Olympic equivalent of the girl who was on Sportscenter for beating the shit out of other girls in a college game, complete with hair pulls. Tancredi isn't that blatant, but just as much of a cunt.
It's the Olympics, which include sporting competitions, not the world feel-good summit. If your Nation fields a shitty team, that's not the other competitor's fault. The US has won about 70 medals right now, which is pretty good. But, there are about 1000 possible medals. The US sucks at plenty of events. Nigeria knew what they were getting into - they wanted a chance to compete against the best, but they just aren't any good. That's not the US team's fault.
Not to mention the fact they're just happy to get these guys autographs afterwards anyway. That's been talked about time and time again. Except for the top teams laden with NBA players, a lot of the other countries teams are just happy to meet everyone.
On the note of things that hurt, Nicolas Batum of France and the Portland Trailblazers is a classy fellow!
Some more of that would get me to start watching basketball! *Upon further review, that was an intentional nutshot. Nevermind, not cool.