Random Olympic thoughts…
Various things that popped into my head over the course of the last two weeks…
The real star of the Olympic track and field competition wasn’t the electrifying Usain Bolt, the possibly-to-be-knighted Mo Farah, Jess Ennis, David Rudisha, or any other athlete. It was the fans. Long-time Olympic observers said they’d never seen anything like it. The stadium was sold out time after time after time, even for morning qualifying-round action. They were loud, with veterans of EPL and NFL games saying they’d never heard anything like the noise generated when Mo Farah finished off his 10k/5k double. The fan turnout on the streets for the marathon was similarly unprecedented. What I think people will remember from these Olympics was that people came out for it and they had fun…
The planners certainly had fun with the opening and closing ceremonies. They got the most staid monarch on earth to play along with a joke to start it all off. They allowed Eric Idle to almost certainly become the first person to ever sing the word “shit” at a closing ceremony (and finally evening the score with John Cleese, who is immensely proud of being the first person to say that same word on the BBC)…
The dangers of celebrity reared its ugly head back home for one American hurdler. Lolo Jones was scorned by Jere Longman in the New York Times as being shallow and all for show, comparing her record of achievement to that of Anna Kournikova. I don’t understand how he thought she should not aggressively pursue endorsements and sponsorships, the only real way to make a living in track and field these days, and instead accept a lower income just because she took a while to recover from last year’s spinal cord surgery. I have never before seen a better example of the phrase don’t hate the player, hate the game. It’s not like he himself would pass up an opportunity to become more widely known for reasons besides winning a Pulitzer…
Mo Farah may have the Mobot, and Usain Bolt may have To Di World, but Ezekiel Kemboi showed us who really has the moves…
SI’s Tim Layden knows that pretty much the entirety of the records let on the books from the 1980s were fueled by (a lot of) steroids. There’s fairly good documentation of it on the East Germans. He then asked how it is possible for the U.S. women’s 4×100 relay to break one of them without at least some being on the juice themselves? A few things should be noted, among them that sprinting has seen a revolution in technique in the last 15 years and that tracks are much faster now than they were 30 years ago. But there’s another big issue: that record did not represent the full ability of the East Germans, and just happened to stand for one reason or another until the Communist machines fell apart. From Track and Field News‘ writeup on the record-setting run at the World Cup, in the November 1985 issue:
…there was no reason to suspect a record until the time flashed on the board. The DDR passes were good but not extraordinary, and they were running less than full strength, with 21-year-old Sabine Rieger replacing superstar Marita Koch, who ran the second leg on the previous record team in 1983.
I’m not going to say that it’s impossible for anyone on this U.S. team to be on the juice. But no one would say about them what was said above, that the team was without its superstar or that the passing was not top-notch. (On paper this Olympic final was an even match, as the Jamaican foursome’s total of seasonal best times was pretty much exactly the same as that of the American squad’s, but the U.S. team whupped ‘em by a massive amount due almost entirely to superior stickwork.) Context is everything. By the way, the correspondent who wrote that piece for TFN is none other than Bob Hersh, now the IAAF’s first vice president and the highest-ranking American in the 100-year history of the organization…
Tomorrow I’ll take a look at Team USA’s big medal haul, and on Wednesday I’ll add to the vitriol spewed at NBC…
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