Miscellaneous Olympic Musings

While watching the results from London's Hampton Court in the women's Olympic cycling time trials last night (or rather, this morning) on NBC's after-hours coverage hosted by Mary Carillo, and savoring the golden farewell of Kristin (no relation to Lance) Armstrong, who repeated her first-place finish in Beijing, I realized two things.  The first is that I miss Hannah Storm.  It's not that I don't like Mary Carillo; I just miss Hannah Storm.  The second is that NBC has to stop it with those phony studio sets.  This time, NBC has put Mary Carillo in a studio designed to look like a library, with an antique globe, multi-paned windows reaching from the floor to the ceiling, and bookshelves loaded with lots and lots of books, as if to drive the point home that Britain is a literate country.  (I know it is, I learned that from reading Paul Fussell.)  I keep wishing that Stephen Colbert could come to the after-hours show and take a "book" out to read.  (Remember when he sat in the "fire" in the "fireplace" in the studio at Vancouver in 2010?) But as he's not co-sponsoring a team contingent this time, it's not going to happen.

What unexpectedly did happen was that American gymnast Danell Leyva pulled out a bronze-medal victory in the men's all-around gymnastics competition after almost blowing it on the pommel horse.  (His teammate John Orozco did just that.)  Leyva has become famous for his "lucky towel," a towel dotted with five-pointed an six-pointed stars that he drapes himself in before and after every routine.  This should put to rest the idea that superstitions make a difference, even psychologically.  If Leyva's lucky towel helped him, why did he only win a bronze?   

I just finished watching the men's canoe double live, in which two British pairs won the gold and silver medals.  After one of the canoers apparently fell into the water at the bottom of the artificial rapids, the other canoers and their coaches all jumped in.  It looked like a cross between an evangelical baptism and a Monty Python sketch.  ("We have the Foreign Secretary, who has just returned from the bitter fighting in the Gulf of Oman.  He's going to tell us about . . . canoeing!")             

Much more to talk about . . . later . . .