Oksana Chusovitina and Dana Torres have redefined what is possible for people over the age of 30 in competitive athletics. Oksana won a silver medal in the vault and Dana Torres won a silver in the 50 meter freestyle. Both of these events were assumed to be the domain of the young.
I wonder whether this will change the nature of the kind of athletes we see at the Olympics.
Who needs 13 year old gymnasts, we have 30+ year old gymnasts!
And if Michael Phelps is still swimming at 40 and still winning medals at 40, we may be looking at a ridiculously large haul of medals…
One of the creepiest events to watch has been the diving competition. Not because the sport is creepy. Actually the sport is surprisingly fun to watch.
No the female announcer, Cynthia Potter, has been very, very, very creepy. I mean after the 2004 Olympics where I had to suffer through the announcers repeatedly telling us about how the Hamm twins rolled in the hay as young boys (yech! I mean yech!!! I mean twins, hay, rolling.. YECH!!!) I was convinced the creepiness bar could never be surpassed.
No she surpassed it with her asinine comment on why the divers take a shower after each dive:
They just want to have fun.
I mean, what is this the car wash scene from Charlie’s Angels?
And her fawning over the athletes was down right lecherous. I mean, yech…
Of course the cameras which followed the men and women as they take a shower, and the pool that doesn’t have a wall to give them some privacy is just as creepy…
During the woman’s 3 meter diving final, an American diver had a horrible dive where the water sprayed all over the place. The announcer was stunned and could not resist the following comment:
If surf’s up after the diver enters the water, there’s a problem.
Watching the Olympics I was reminded of Voula Patoulidou’s race in 1992.
For over 80 years, no Greek had won a gold medal in track and field.
I remember because I didn’t actually see the race. I mean, she was a Greek sprinter. Greek sprinters don’t win races. Greek athletes choke on the biggest stages. So I got up and started to walk along the beach in Kamari … and then I heard the cheering, the ecstatic cheering.
A lot of American tourists, I thought. But then I noticed some friends of mine, and they were cheering. So I went up to look, and there it was, Voula Patoulidou had won gold. She had won the gold medal!
I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. A mistake. It must have been a mistake.
But that was not what made her a legend.
No it was 20 to 30 minutes later when the Greek press was trying to interview her, trying to get her thoughts. And you could see how unbelievably happy she was. She was, literally bouncing off the walls, trying to digest what happened. She was screaming incoherently, trying to say something. And then she grabbed her husband (?) and said the phrase that made her a legend:
Gia tin Ellada, re gamoto!
Which literally means "For Greece damnit", but some things can not be translated. She was looking at the eighty years of failure, of misery, of futility, of Greeks convinced that winning was something other peoples do and said:
Torres. n. tor-ez. 1) calling into question an accomplishment based on unconfirmed speculation of shenanigans. Bryce said he got the bartender’s number, but everyone called Torres on his account of the story.
Morgan Freeman in the Visa ad, tried to come up with an adjective to describe what 8 gold medals mean.
And so he said
Well if one gold medal is great and two is incredible, and three is unbelievable, then well, eight is … we’ll have to come up with a way to describe it.
Maybe Phelps teammate came up with the right phrase:
One of the more, most?, irritating aspects of today’s search engines is that for all of their bullshit about "content neutrality", they obviously prefer to redirect you to their sites.
So look for an image on Yahoo and you get a whole bunch of flickr pages.
Look for the same image on Google, and flickr doesn’t even exist.
Don’t believe me? Look at a search in yahoo images for Tony
And what happens when I look for Tony on Google images?
So Hoff just finished a great performance and Andrea is interviewing her:
Andrea; How were you able to recover after your bronze medal performance in the 400 IM? (I mean you were the favorite and choked)
Katie Hoff (who assumes Andrea is talking about the disappointment of how she swam, implying that she choked, and is visibly irritated): well actually I did quite well in that race, matching a personal best.
Andrea: Oh no, I was talking about your endurance (a visibly freaked out Andrea who is not looking forward to being relegated to interviewing people on the street about the Olynpics)
Katie Hoff: OHHHHHHH… that’s what you meant (Lying bitch, but I’ll give you that out so you can keep your job)
