Gratitude

The tough thing about trying to watch all of the coverage of the Olympic Games is trying to watch all of the coverage of the Olympic Games.
There is so much to try to absorb that I have resorted to taking notes and still recognize that I miss so much along the way.
Here are some things I have seen and noted.

First, do you know who is in this following picture? We have already seen 1000 interviews with the women's gymnastic team but do you recognize this person who won gold in 2008 in Beijing and just repeated in London? What event?

Trying to get information and video on the NBC Olympics site is difficult even with the fiber optic internet connection that I have. Everything still loads slowly and I think the most annoying thing that website developers do these days is add the applications from social media sites so that their users can “like” or “follow” the sites on those sites like Facebook and Twitter. Each of these applications has to take the time to add up how many users from those sites are fans of the one that you are trying to watch and it bogs down everything. Combined with all of the flash media ads and other types of animated ads on the sites it is an exercise in frustration to access the site properly.
I tried to get an idea about what else has been happening in boxing and just gave up the effort since my computer processor is whizzing at 100% capacity and I think its going to blow up soon.
The reason I was looking at boxing is because I saw one of our matches with the captain of the US team and he lost in the first round. He was apparently the second to do so.
This is telling me that boxing is dying out here in this country. With the rise in popularity in Mixed Martial Arts and the overregulation in boxing the choice for those who want to compete in a fiercely physical event is becoming clearer all of the time and boxing is second trombone now.

Michael Phelps picked up his 18^th and 19^th Olympic medals yesterday; one was silver in the 200 Fly (his specialty) and one was gold in the 4x200 relay.
He was out touched at the wall by Chad Le Clos from South Africa. He admitted that he had been getting lazy touching the wall in practices and, don’t you know, what he does in practice he does in the game. For those who have had coaches in the sports you have played perhaps have heard that little cliché at some point.

Phelps is a guy who has all the attention because of his success. Because of all of the interviews he has done over the years he is savvy in front of the camera and never seems nervous or even interested. Because of all the success he has had I imagine that it could even get old to him after a while. In one that I saw after the 200-Fly defeat he mentioned that he was having more fun during these Olympics and pretty much by design. It has been clear that he simply hasn’t put as much effort into winning this time around as he had in the past. In fact, he was originally scheduled to compete in as many as ten events but pared it down to, I think, seven. He apparently didn’t even train for the 400 IM, in which he finished fourth and was the defending champion. Nice to know that he doesn’t even have to train and can still get 4^th place but it is disappointing to see that talent wasted especially when so many others work so hard just to get there.



I was supposed to train??



Not that Phelps doesn’t deserve to be in that race even though he didn’t train for it, of course, but I find it lacking in gratitude a bit. Take, for instance, Caitlin Leverenz, who won a bronze medal in the pool in her only event. Her tears at the finish line were because she simply had ONE medal and it was for third place. I find that emotion much more endearing to me. Sure, Phelps has had that same look on his face in previous Olympics but the lack of it this year bothers me a little.

The grateful face of Caitlin Leverenz,
swimming bronze medalist

I have long been tired of all of the attention that Gymnastics receives in the Olympics. I get why there is so much, but I still think its way overproduced. After every commercial we have to watch another specially designed bumper, teaser and introduction of our little gymnasts that just don’t get done for other athletes who have had much more success and most of the time have much better stories than five 15-17 year-old girls who just haven’t had the life experience that is worth chronicling like so many others.

That said, I still want them to do well and bring home the gold. It is tense and nerve-wracking and what they do athletically is amazing. (I just want the same attention paid to other athletes, that’s all.)
The team competition was last night, as we all certainly well know by now and they indeed win gold and were the first American team to do so since 1996 in Atlanta. Now, winning in 96 was a big deal, but I think the feat is more significant doing it in another country.
There are four elements on which three girls from each team compete just one time; the vault, uneven bars, balance beam and floor exercise. Stunts done on this equipment is pretty amazing even on the flat surface on the floor exercise.
The US jumped out early taking on the vault. McKayla Maroney only competed in the vault. The team put her on the team strictly for that and since the number of team members has been cut from 7 to 5 this said two things; first that the rest of the team had to be very, very strong across the board in the other events and that Maroney was one hell of a vaulter.

Gabby Douglas, Aly Raisman, McKayla Maroney, Jordyn Wieber, Kyla Ross

The Russians began to creep back up on the US and the race was tight after the uneven bars, which is America’s weakest of the four. But the Russians fell apart on the balance beam and the US held it together on an element which is the most difficult of them all. These kids do back flips and land on a 4-inch wide board three feet in the air. Jordyn Wieber, the current world champion, had some balance issues in the preliminary rounds on the beam which, in part, led to her not qualifying for the all-around medal still to be contested. So it’s brutal. All three of the Russian girls had difficulty on the beam and then the Americans had to deal with the floor exercise with a handy lead.
The US had to simply average a score of 13 between the three girls to clinch gold. In the preliminaries they averaged over 14 so there wasn’t as much pressure as there really could have been had the Russians been able to pull off a better performance on the beam.
In the warm-ups, Aly Raisman, from the US, nearly landed straight on her head on a tumbling run. Tim Daggett, the NBC analyst prophetically said that she should cut that part out of her routine, which she later did.
Up first on the floor was Gabby Douglas, who has a smile which many people claim is gold-medal worthy itself. I disagree with that assessment and think, rather, that her smile shows that she needs a lot of work in there, but I digress.
Gabby is very athletic but definitely robotic in motions with her arms and head that should be much more graceful. She scores a 15 in the routine which means that Jordyn Wieber has less pressure on her during her routine.
Wieber is clearly much more graceful in her turn. Plus, like Douglas, nails all of her tumbling runs and scores another 15.
Raisman now just need a score of 10.234 to clinch gold for America. This basically means that she could go out on the floor and do a basic headstand and she is on a box of Wheaties in a month’s time. Since she nearly landed on her head earlier in warm-ups we all knew she could pull that off. She did, and it was Gold for the US and the beginning of 1000 interviews on NBC was about to begin.

When we win the gold in any of these gymnastics events it makes suffering through all of the over-blown coverage of it worth while. There is still much more to come of that too, of course.

What it took to clinch the gold for the US in the last element

Did you know that Vince Hancock, skeet shooter, won his second straight Olympic gold medal? If you didn’t, you do now.
It’s not that NBC doesn’t cover this and get the news out about it, its just that it so token that it’s insulting.

Vince Hancock

Did you know that Kristen Armstrong won her second straight gold medal in the Cycling Time Trials? Her story is so much better than the gymnasts’ stories and should be a highly covered event. Yet we see it at 9am in the morning instead of 9pm.
Armstrong became the oldest female gold medalist in women’s cycling at the age of 38.
But what is more amazing than that is that she suffers from arthritis in her hips and just this past MAY she broke her collarbone and had surgery to repair it. This was just two years after taking time off from the sport to have a child. THIS is the type of story that should be produced for a prime-time airing. Now, it still may show up later so I could be premature in my criticism.

The first picture in this blog entry is Kristen Armstrong.

I mentioned the other day about athletes from America competing for other countries. Well, there are certainly times when the opposite is true. Take, for one example, Khatuna Lorig, an archer. I was watching some of her competition this morning as she won her first two matches to become the first American archer to advance to the round of 16 so far this year. Lorig is originally from Georgia in the former USSR who came to the US and became a US citizen. I have a great deal of admiration for that type of dedication and personal sacrifice to become free to do the things that we are free to do here in America. It makes me seethe with disgust to hear anyone who is a natural born citizen in our country take our country for granted ever.

At this moment the US is ahead in the total medal count with 25. China is second with 23 but they lead us in gold 13-9.
Swimmer Allison Schmidt has won one of each color to tie with Phelps and fellow swimmer Ryan Lochte with three total medals.

The first official scandal of the games goes to Badminton as four teams have been disqualified for throwing matches. This was done, apparently, to secure better draws in the event. Who would do that in the Olympics? This is, to me, perhaps a more egregious crime than blood doping is. Because at least those who are doping, while cheating, are going all out to win, not going half way out to win. Am I wrong about that? Which is actually worse?

Badminton Crooks

Regular Crooks

But the most horrible errors have been on display by the NBC crew on the Today Show trying to cover sporting events and athletes.
First, Ryan Seacrest, of American Idol fame, is there trying to do athlete interviews. He is clearly clueless about sports so its embarrassing to watch his try to do it.

Seacrest out!....PLEASE!

Fortunately for Ryan, he was outdone this morning by one of the women hosts on the show. While interviewing the top seeded American beach volleyball team, her question to Phil Dalhausser was, “So which team would you like to see in the finals, the undefeated Brazilians?” To which Dalhausser replied, “We’d like to see our compatriots in the finals with us.”
That was the best answer of the day to the worst question of the day (of the month) and it’s obvious – Dalhausser wants America to go 1-2 in that event. He wants the other team to be number two, of course, but certainly he doesn’t want any other team to take that spot.

I know these Today Show people aren’t knowledgeable about sports. They really only know how to talk about food and read a teleprompter, but there really should have been some thought to having someone who has a clue about sports at least jot down some questions that would make them look a lot better than they do there.

Done