Or alternatively more musings about the Beijing Olympics. There's even less NASCAR here than last time, and that was just a picture....

They Tricked Us.......

I take everything positive I said about the Olympics opening ceremony, basically because because a lot of it came together not in around the Birds' Nest stadium in Beijing, but in a post-production office infront of a bunch of techno ####ins. First came news that the flaming footprints, symbolising gunpowder (you know the stuff I praised in my day 1+2 blog entry) had been computer generated, and then added to the "live" broadcast. And if that didn't make you feel dirty enough they've even started medling with children's voices. The red dress-ed girl who we all saw singing at the ceremony, was not infact singing at all, in what is probably China's answer to Milli Vanilli. Instead the voice of another was played, and the girl on stage - 9 year old Lin Miaoke mimed over it. Of course, you can say that such practices have been going on in show buisness seemingly forever. But it gets slightly more sinister when you look into the official reason for it, which is (apparently) it was in the best interests for China. Yes, the People's Republic felt it so necessary to have a perfect singing nine year old that they risked the integrity (especially if you think of several high-profile mime screw-up) of the ceremony.

Left: Who you Heard  Right: Who you Saw (BBC.co.uk)

It's bad enough that, with performance enhancing drugs everywhere in sport, you have to take every great performance, every heroic come-back, every underdog-come-good story with a sizable pinch of salt. Now it seems that even the Opening Ceremony is not averse to some performancing enhancing jiggery-pokery.

There's something in the water

It's become perfectly clear for whatever reason that the Water Cube, the venue for Beijing's swimming events, is seriously fast. There might be something in the water, the sides might be slightly sprung, allowing a better push off on the turn, or alternatively, the swimmers might just be getting better (although if you can't trust a 9 year old girl, who can you trust).

World, national, Olympic records are all tumbling seemingly after every race, a certain Mr Phelps has three World Records already. There also seems to be a high number of what I have come to refer to as 'Outboard motor moments', when a swimmer will pull back an absolutely enormous gap in a very short distance, like they had strapped an outboard motor to their feet (see I'm putting nothing past them). My first sight of this phonomenom came in the 400m Freestyle when Briton Rebecca Adlington seemingly flew the final length to win gold, despite not being place 1st, 2nd or 3rd at any of the split time after any of the previous 7 lengths.

But then came the real miracle, the race that has been the subject already of a handful of blogs around here - America's win in the 4x100m relay. This was what I thought was a crucial part in Michael Phelp's potentially historic Olympic - where he relies on other people to get him gold medals. I feared that the relative faliability of, well, everyone else compared to Phelps may threaten his chances. But as it happens, exactly the opposite happened. After three legs the French team were leading by a seemingly insurmountable distance. Commentators were already writing the obituraries for Phelp's 8-gold title. Maybe so was Phelps. One man hadn't. That man was Jason Lezak, swimming the anchor leg for the US. In the final 50m Lezak gained a distance equal to the entire body length of his French rival to come home first, breaking the World Record by 4 (yes 4) seconds. I don't know what sort of plans there are inside the US swim team, but no matter how many medal Phelps gets I think Jason Lezak's name should be just after his in the history books.

So it's 3 gold medals from 3 events for Superfish, with three World Records to boot. While he ultimately aims to get 5 more gold medals, he only needs one more to gain another, very sizable accolade - that of the most successful Olympian ever. I don't think it needs pointing out just how massive that is.

                                       Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

Medals Togo

In the run up to the Olympics I read one blog on here (that I haven't the energy or the courage to face the Whoops! monster to find) that asked who this year's Eric the Eel world be. For those of you who don't know Eric was a swimmer from Equatorial Guinea who competed in the 2000 Olympics, he famously was claimed to have trained by outswimming crocodiles. This was probably made up, as at the time he managed - double that of the medal contending athletes - he would have been eaten long before Sydney came around.

Anyway, since then I've been looking for a spectacular underdog story to match Eric, and I think I've found one, and this one even wins a medal. His name is Benjamin Boukpeti. He is a canoeist. He is a legend.

His country, Togo, had never won an Olympic medal before. If I was asked where I though any Togo-ese medal would come from I would have picked one of the events where the African nations traditionally do well, such as the long distance athletics event. I would not have picked canoeing. But that's probably why I'm tryping this from my house, while others are being paid to make predictions and intelligent comments in Beijing.

Boukpeti finished 3rd in the K-1 slalom event, bringing forth one of the best celebrations I've ever seen, involving general hysterics and smashing his paddle in half over the front of his boat. Meanwhile the Beijing organisers were probably frantically looking for a Togo-ese flag.

                       The Man, The Boat, The Paddle(s). The Legend