Ireland Still Not On the Olympic Podium

Israel won its first gold medal in the Olympics. Mazel Tov! While I'm happy to see the Jewish state win its first gold medal - in mistral sailing - I have been preoccupied by my disappointment in another country. I checked the medal count today, and I realized that one of the many nations that have not won any medals in Athens is . . . Ireland.

That's right. Ireland, the Emerald Isle, the land of my paternal ancestors, the nation of Joyce, O'Casey, and Bono, has not won a single medal at these Olympics. Not even a lousy bronze medal. One country that has at least managed to do that much is Eritrea, a former Ethiopian province on the Red Sea that achieved its independence in 1993. I mean, come on, Eritrea hasn't even been as independent as long as the Olsen twins have been alive, and it has a medal and the Irish have zip? And to think that only eight years ago, Ireland won three gold medals and a bronze, and they were all awarded to the same athlete.

I'm talking, of course, about swimmer Michelle Smith, whom I've already mentioned here. You might remember that back at the Atlanta Games in 1996, Smith was the subject of controversy after she won a place in the women's 400-meter freestyle final by dropping an exorbitant amount of time off her personal best. With only circumstantial evidence as their basis, the United States Swimming Federation accused Smith of using steroids. Compounding these accusations was the charge that Smith violated a rule to get into the final. And she did break a rule, but the Olympic judges ruled that she had done so inadvertently, and let her swim her way to victory.

The USSF had arrived in Atlanta, ironically enough, to keep an eye out for cheating swimmers from China. The Chinese, like the East Germans before them, had been suspected (with some justification) of giving steroids to their swimmers. Perhaps because Chinese Olympic officials were afraid of getting caught, their swimmers ended up being less formidable in the pool than expected. But when Michelle Smith came out of nowhere to win three swimming events, the USSF found a new villain in . . . Ireland? Yes, Ireland, the same country that had been kicked around by the English for eight hundred years, was suddenly the new Olympic bogeyman. First the Red Scare, then the Yellow Peril, now. . . the Emerald Green Menace. Hardly surprisingly, the Irish were offended by this demonstration of ugly Americanism, and a wave of anti-American demonstrations swept the country. We Americans had succeeded in offending the only European country where the people still liked us. (As an Irish-American, I was cheering for her all the way and I was disgusted by the USSF's charges.)

Smith, to her credit, was as ladylike as possible throughout the ordeal. She eventually took - and passed - several drug tests, but American swimming coaches, convinced that she was somehow cheating, insisted that she somehow had given a compromised urine sample. Adding to the fracas was the fact that Smith's husband, a Dutch swimmer, had been banned from competition for using steroids, thus rendering her guilty by association. Smith insisted that her improved swimming came not from her husband's medicine cabinet but from a different training regimen he made her stick to. With Smith clearly having her drug tests and popular opinion (except, of course, among Americans) in her favor, the USSF looked more ridiculous by the day. A major rift between Ireland the United States was averted, though, when President Bill Clinton - no stranger to accusations of foul play - congratulated Smith in person and apologized for the rotten way the USSF treated her.

Anyway, Smith returned to Ireland a celebrated athlete and national heroine. She soon announced that she was hoping to get an Olympic-sized pool built in Ireland and planned to get the Irish Olympic Committee to invest a greater effort in its swimming program. Then the thatched roof caved in.

As I noted before, Michelle Smith failed another drug test in 1998. Though she continued to profess her innocence - how could she fail a drug test and still be innocent was never exactly explained - she was banned from international competition for four years, effectively ending her career. Smith is 35 - four years older than the grande dame of American swimming, Jenny Thompson - so after she missed the Sydney Olympics, qualifying for Athens was out of the question for her. The result of all this drama-mama? You don't hear my Irish cousins boast about Michelle Smith so much these days.

I honestly don't know how much of an effect Michelle Smith's fall from grace actually had on the Irish Olympic movement, but clearly the momentum she built for it has dissipated. The only bright side to this sad saga is that Smith's victories from Atlanta remain in the record books. There is still no evidence that she took any steroids then, and she continues to insist that she did not. But her 1998 ban still makes those of us who supported her - including me - wonder if maybe, just maybe, we were fooled. We'll never really know. The best thing Ireland can do is leave this whole affair behind and concentrate on making new Olympic history. Instead, the Irish Olympic movement has collapsed.

Come on, my Irish cousins, get your act together. We don't need more Olympic athletes who lose all the time; we already have the U.S. men's field hockey team.

More Miscellaneous 2016 Olympics Musings

The U.S. women's soccer team lost to Sweden at the Olympics and so was eliminated from medal contention.  The gave up the game to the Swedes in penalty kicks to break a tie.  Oh, well, you can't win 'em all.  And the men can't win at all.

This would be no big deal if not for post-game comments from American goalkeeper Hope Solo, who stalled for time before Swedish player Lisa Dahlkvist scored the winning goal and thus fired the shot heard 'round the world, hadn't offered this sour quote after the game:  "We lost to a bunch of cowards. The better team did not win."  Asked to expand on that, she said, "Sweden dropped off. They didn't want to open play. They didn't want to pass the ball. They didn't want to play great soccer."

And with that, Solo wins the Nancy Kerrigan Award for Bad Sportsmanship.  But then, at least Nancy Kerrigan could argue that she should have won the women's figure skating gold medal in 1994 because figure skating is a subjective sport.  Soccer is very objective - the team with the most goals wins the game.  The Swedish ladies didn't have to play great; they just had to win.  And they did.

Meanwhile . . . how about Maya Dirado?  She upset Hungary's Katinka Hosszú by six one-hundredths of a second in the women's 200-meter backstroke race.  I turned away from the telly thinking Hosszú was going to win, then I looked back barely in time to see Dirado touch the wall first!  Even when I saw the replay, I couldn't believe it. I'm sure Dirado couldn't believe it either.

And now that Hosszú has to settle for silver, is her husband responsible for her loss of the gold?  Well, he should be held responsible.

Also, Michael Phelps went into the water with the hope of winning the 100-meter butterfly. He ended up losing to Singaporean swimmer Joseph Schooling - whom Phelps once met when Schooling was a kid back in 2008 - and sharing the silver with South Africa's Chad LeClos and Lazslo Cseh of the Czech Republic. Yes, three-way ties happen.  Did fifth-place finisher Li Zhuhao of China get a bronze medal? No, but he should have. Why waste a bronze medal by not handing it out?

Oh, yeah, Schooling set a new Olympic record in the 100 fly.

Also, congrats to American swimmers Anthony Ervin and Nathan Adrian for winning gold and bronze, respectively, in the men's "splash and dash" 50-meter freestyle.  Although, I would have preferred to see Ervin show more modesty, in the style of Tom Dolan, when he won.

And while you weren't paying attention, brothers Gary and Paul O'Donovan of Ireland won the silver medal for in the lightweight men's doubles rowing competition - Ireland's first medal in these Games and its first Olympic rowing medal in history.  Ethnic pride here!

Whoever said "You don't win silver, you lose gold" obviously never won a silver . . . and obviously wasn't Irish. :-)

Our Male Olympians Are Slipping!

In the past three Olympiads, including this one, American women have been dominating the medal count for Team USA, particularly in team sports. A lot of Americans, particularly those who believe we have the right to win everything, can't understand why the men haven't done as well.

I'll tell you why - the men suck.

Don't take my word for it. Just look at all the men's teams that aren't at Athens. Take soccer. While the women are favored medal contenders, the men's team didn't even qualify. (Oh, well, we can always root for the team representing our fifty-first state, Iraq.) While we're represented in the women-only sport of softball, the men's baseball team is personae non grata, unable to defend their gold medal in Sydney against Cuba and Japan. The men's field hockey team isn't in Athens either. To be fair, neither are the women, but at least the women, unlike the men, don't bear the stigma of an Olympic record of 28 games lost, one game tied, and no games won. (Hey, that's nearly a perfect record!)

At least we can point to our success in men's basketball. (Oops, maybe I spoke too soon . . ..)

So why do the men in this country suck at team sports so much these days? Actually, I don't give a ##!!**++!. I'm not here to offer pointers for anyone. But when Olympic historian Bud Greenspan talks about the U.S. having the strongest national team ever when we can't even compete in a game we invented and we almost lose to Greece in another sport we invented, you have to wonder what the ##!!**++! he's talking about. We Americans think we can win at anything and everything, and so we expect to dominate the Games in every conceivable way possible. This is nonsense, of course - no country can dominate the whole shabang, and such boasting can, in other countries at least, be chalked up to good old-fashioned patriotism. But we seem to believe our own bragging to the point where we actually expect to win a medal in everything, including every men's team sport - when we have enough trouble in the ones we're supposed to be good at (I'll cite our nightmarish basketball team again). Do we really think we deserve the chance to win a gold medal in team handball, a sport we as a people suck so much in, even the women's team couldn't qualify for it?

I suppose we could improve our athletic quality in men's team sports, but since this is obviously not going to happen any time soon, least of all in field hockey - when was the last time junior field hockey leagues in this country were open to boys? - we could at least admit our shortcomings. That won't happen either. Because whenever we suck, bite, chomp, or eat it at something, we simply ignore the problem and change the subject. We'd be much better off if we followed the Irish model.

Let me explain. Except for Michelle Smith's three swimming gold medals at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta - victories held under suspicion since Smith failed a drug test in 1998 - Ireland has pretty much never won a medal of any kind in swimming. Kind of ironic for an island country so strongly connected to the sea, I know, but that's not the issue here. The issue is that, for whatever reason, Ireland is not a swimming powerhouse like, say, Equatorial Guinea (joke). Certainly not like Australia, anyway. Sadly, there is no way anyone in Ireland - not even Michelle Smith - can reverse their longstanding national habit of sucking at swimming. But the Irish, bless their hearts, not only admit this, they laugh about it. The Irish Olympic Committee has always looked at the bright side; they openly say that while their swimmers may not win a lot of races, the good news is that none of them have ever drowned.

Too bad we can't have the same attitude. We'd be better off if we made light of our suckiness at team handball and console ourselves with the fact that at least the ball never knocked anyone on our team out cold. (At least I don't think it ever did.) It would be an optimistic way of looking at our pathetic men's teams, and it would help us find a silver lining in place of a silver medal. It would re-affirm our reputation as an optimistic people. Instead, every four years at the Games, we try to divert attention from our suckiness at men's field hockey or men's soccer by pointing to the women, or, better yet, accuse someone in another sport of cheating, and hope no one will notice our lesser athletes.

This year, it won't work. Everyone is paying attention to the U.S. men's basketball team. And they're not exactly reinforcing our winning reputation in that sport now.

Regarding the men's basketball team, by the way - what the ##!!**++!?

No Luck Of the Irish

In what's turning out to be a time-honored tradition at the Olympics, Ireland has not won anything yet. This is really pathetic. You expect a country to suck at one sport or another - say, the United States with table tennis and team handball. But why should a single country suck at practically everything?  Here's a list of the countries that have gotten on the medal scoreboard by winning at least one bronze each: Azerbaijan, Belgium, Greece, India, Moldova, Qatar, Serbia, Singapore and Uzbekistan.  Even four former Soviet and Yugoslav republics are Ireland's superiors in international athletics.   

As I wrote in this post from 2004 during the Athens Olympics (written a few days before they won an equestrian gold medal there), the Irish have had their moment of glory - note the singular person - in Olympic competition.  Specifically, it was a single swimmer (Michelle Smith) who won three gold medals and a bronze in Atlanta.  And as I wrote in that same post, the Irish let themselves think it was an encouraging sign of things to come, only to set themselves up for bitter disappointment. Suffice to say, they bought into a (very fleeting) moment.  Kind of like their land speculation of the past decade.

Look, I know the Irish have a lot more important things to worry about at this moment, what with their economy invested in bad banks and bad land deals and all that (understanding the details hurts my head and accepting the reality of a broken Ireland hurts my heart), but it would be nice to see them win a medal in something, if only to lift the nation's spirit and to win something in the Olympics on English soil.

As of today, the hosting Brits have fifteen Olympic medals: five gold, six silver, four bronze.  If you had the luck of the Irish, you'd wish you were English instead.

Oh, well, the equestrian events aren't done yet . . .    

A Nation Once Again

Back in 2004, I fretted about the the fact that the Irish hadn't won a medal at the Athens Olympics, when showjumper Cian O'Connor then won a gold medal in showjumping.  I mentioned that in my earlier post about the Irish medal drought in London. Well - I have since found out that Cian O'Connor, the winner of that 2004 medal, had to return it because of a failed drug test.  His horse failed it!

O'Connor got some redemption, having won a showjumping bronze medal at the 2012 Games, with riders from Switzerland and the Netherlands taking the gold and silver medals, respectively.  But - and here's the point - he not only won a medal, he won it for Ireland on British soil.  And he won it after the British showjumpers choked.  (Let's just hope O'Connor's horse was drug-free this time!) 

And we may yet get to hear "A Soldier's Song" played on British soil yet, because boxer Katie Taylor is in a position to win a gold medal. Taylor, who carried the Irish flag at the opening ceremony, is scheduled to fight against Russia's Sofya Ochigava for the first women's Olympic boxing gold today, meaning she can at least get a silver.  

I first got to hear "A Soldier's Song" anywhere when swimmer Michelle Smith won three gold medals at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.  Seeing her win three races was like St. Patrick's Day coming eight months early. When the Americans - you know, the Americans, who are supposed to be number one in everything - accused her of steroid use, I was disgusted.  I particularly was mad with my fellow Americans of the Irish diaspora for not defending Smith.  Seeing, say, swimmer Tom Dolan, one of the first Americans to win a medal at Atlanta, defend her would have been nice.  Very disappointing.  Anyway, she passed all her drug tests then, and her victories are still part of the official Olympic record.  But she failed a drug test in August 1998, resulting in a four-year suspension.  She maintained her innocence, though I have no idea how she could explain away those test results, and they left me with a lingering doubt about 1996.  But then, I've already talked about that here.  

Elation followed by deflation . . . the defining characteristic of a nation.  I hope Katie Taylor wins in the ring.  But I can't help but recall the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan's pearl of wisdom after the Kennedy assassination: "I don't think there's any point in being Irish if you know the world is going to break your heart eventually."       

Dopes On Dope

The Russian track and field team has been barred from competing at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, because it became apparent that many of its athletes were passing steroids around like eggnog at a Christmas party.  The practice of using performance enhancers (sounds like something you'd put in your car, right?) was through a system of state-sponsored doping that many of us naively thought had died with the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

Not every Russian track and field athlete has used steroids, of course, but those who haven't will not get to compete in Rio short of competing without representing an actual country.  Unified Team, anyone?  No word yet on whether or not that's possible.

Steroid use is obviously more widespread that anyone realized, but it's getting more difficult to avoid detection.  It took seven years to find out that American track star Marion Jones had drugged her way to the finish line at the 2000 Sydney Games; now, though, two of the eighteen medals won by Russian track and field athletes at the 2012 Olympics - four years after - have already been stripped, with more in possible jeopardy.  There's the sense that a whole DSW outlet's worth of shoes could drop before this story plays out.

It turns out that the capacity for human deception, long thought wide, is in fact infinite. When athletes  suspected of steroid use on the basis of sudden, miraculous improvement in their performances passed their drug tests, the accusers would suggest that the drug tests themselves were suspicious. Cheating a drug test?  How on earth can you do that?  You either have a steroid in your system, or you don't!  But the cheaters have in fact found creative and somewhat jaw-dropping ways to cheat a drug test.  Among them are putting soap in urine to destroy the steroid, inserting a container of clean urine in one's body and ejecting said urine with - I kid you not - a fake penis, fake tattoos that insert just enough of a steroidal compound into the blood stream to fail detection in a test, and also masking agents.  

One famous example of use of a masking agent was documented on ProCon.org.   After an Olympic swimmer from a country not known for producing swimming champions despite being entirely surrounded by water won three gold medals and a bronze medal at the 1996 Olympics, it was found that this athlete had been "unavailable for out-of-competition drug tests from 1995 onward."  Two drug testers arrived at this swimmer's home and received a urine sample, which was then sent to a laboratory in Spain to be examined.  "The results were shocking," the item read. "The sample contained a level of alcohol that would be fatal if consumed by a human. FINA [the international governing body of swimming] concluded that the sample had been manipulated, [and] that whiskey had been added as a masking agent."

The swimmer was Ireland's Michelle Smith, whom I and several sportswriters believed back in 1996 when she said she had not used steroids.

You want to make the inevitable whiskey joke involving the Irish penchant for drinking, go right ahead, so long as I don't have to hear it.  Yo, dig my surname!

Anyway, Smith has never been proven to have used steroids at the 1996 Olympics, as I have pointed out here before, but the tampering of her sample in 1998 only shows how easy it was even for a single athlete to hide drug use, with no coaxing or assistance from her government.  I knew she tested positive for steroids two years after the Atlanta Games, but the evidence is even more damning than I realized.  And I'm getting tired of revisiting the story.

As for the Russian case, credit goes to the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) for pursuing this and issuing the ban on the Russians.  There's a bit of irony to this; the president of the IAAF is Sebastian Coe, the leader of the organizing committee for the 2012 London Olympics and the shining track star of the 1980 Moscow Olympics.  Back in 1980, the British Olympic team defied a request by Margaret Thatcher to join the idiotic U.S.-led boycott of the Games to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; now Coe has decided that the Russians can't go to Rio.  I love Sebastian Coe; he's a man of integrity.

And though there's no evidence that Michelle Smith cheated at the 1996 Olympics - again, she tested negative for steroids during that competition - and so was never stripped of her Olympic medals,  I have to concede that, when I believed twenty years ago that she didn't cheat (and it was probably ethnic pride more than anything else that caused me to believe so), I was most likely wrong.

I don't mind being wrong.  Some of my best friends are wrong.      

Olympic Comings and Goings

Too much to get to at the Olympics, and I know I won't even come close to getting to everything, but here it goes . . . 

Leon Marchand is quickly becoming France's Michael Phelps, having won two swimming gold medals and having competed in the Olympics to a home crowds - two things Phelps never did.  But they do have the same coach.

The U.S. men's gymnastics team won bronze in tem competition, which men's they're catching up with the women.  Maybe the men's soccer team will catch up with the women one day as well.  Ha ha! I make joke - something I tend to do whenever I mention the U.S. men's soccer team.

At 27 years of age, Katie Ledecky set an Olympic record in wining the 1,500m freestyle swim race.  People are already talking about her competing in 2028 . . . though that depends on who's President in 2028, where the 2028 Olympics are going to be, and whether the Trump dictatorship will let her compete or keep her home out of fear that she might defect. 

What can I say about Simone Biles . . .

. . . that hasn't already been said?  That's not a rhetorical question.  If you can answer it, please do so in the comment section below.

Finally . . . 

Congratulations to Daniel Wiffen, from my ancestral homeland of Ireland, for becoming the first male Irish swimmer to win an Olympic swimming gold medal (in the 800m freestyle).  By all accounts, it's a more meaningful accomplishment than that achieved by the first female Irish swimmer to win an Olympic swimming gold medal.

Erin Go Gold! (And Other Olympic News)

So Ireland finally won a medal in the 2004 Olympics - and it's gold! Irish equestrian Cian O'Connor won it in the individual jumping competition on Friday, insuring the playing of "A Soldier's Song" (that's the Irish national anthem, you know) at a medal ceremony at these Games at least once.

Italy - the land of my mother's family - had mixed results on this final day of competition. Stefano Baldini won the gold medal in the men's marathon - American Mebrathom Keflazighi won the silver, becoming the first U.S. medalist in this event since 1972 - but the Italian men's volleyball team had to settle for silver, losing the gold medal match to Brazil.

Speaking of Brazil, regarding the controversy over Brazilian marathon bronze medalist Vanderlei de Lima and that wacko sports fan who pushed him. . . uh, I don't want to go there.

Russian To Judgment

My jaw dropped when I heard that Kamila Valieva - a fifteen-year-old Russian figure skater who tested positive for steroids at the Beijing Winter Olympics - is being allowed to compete in the women's figure-skating competition.

But she won't receive a medal if she places higher than fourth, so why worry about any of that?

(An investigation into the doping of Miss Valieva will start soon.  It will have an impact on the eventual results of the women's figure skating competition, but it is expected to take months.)

I have no doubt that Kamila Valieva did not intend to cheat.  After all, this is Russia - not Ireland.  ("Steve," my other self is telling me right now, "we don't talk about 1996 anymore!")  The Russian Olympic Committee - which competes for itself, not the Russian nation - probably gave her a steroid pill and told her it was a vitamin, and you have a bunch of she-male swimmers in eastern Germany who went through the same thing back in the 1970s and 1980s.  Valieva is innocent.  That does not, however, make it hunky dory for the Court of Arbitration for Sport and the International Olympic Committee to let her compete even if she takes a second drug test and tests negative.  She should not be allowed to compete because the Russians tried to cheat by giving her a steroid and, by not letting her compete, it would send a message to the Russians and to everyone else - especially the host nation, China - that doping for an edge, even if it's done without the athlete being doped unaware of it, will not be tolerated.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport and the International Olympic Committee not only tolerate it, they've just endorsed it.

The ruling to let Valieva compete stated that "irreparable harm" would be done to Valieva because she, if she were to be banned from competition, would be penalized for something that is most likely not her fault.  But it's more complicated than that.  As sportswriter Dan Wetzel noted, "Valieva isn't just some competitor. Her ability to effortlessly land quads has, in just four months on the senior international level, allowed her to set nine world records and register the three highest scores of all time." The real irreparable harm, he says, would be sending the Russians a signal that they can cheat any old way they want.

"How about the irreparable harm to the skaters who haven't tested positive for a banned substance?" Wetzel asks. "How about the irreparable harm to the Olympics itself?"

The best we can hope for is for someone other than Valieva to win and for two runners-up not named Kamila by their mothers on the podium with the winner.  Oh yeah, I can assure you that the winner will not be an American.  Nathan Chen, after all, won the men's figure skating gold medal for the U.S., and given that figure skating is a subjective sport - it's base on opinions of judges not who crosses the finish line first - the judges in the women's competition are likely to move heaven and earth to make sure an American woman does not get on the top spot of the podium.  (Don't believe me? You'd have to go back to 1960 to find a Winter Olympiad when Americans won both men's and women's single figure-skating gold medals, and they were, respectively, David Jenkins and his future sister-in-law Carol Heiss.) So, although I wish the best for Mariah Bell, Alysa Liu, and Karen Chen (no relation to Nathan), I expect none of them to join the group of American female singles-figure-skating Olympic champions (with seven members, that group may be the most exclusive women's club in America). 

And that's a shame, because I think I can safely assumeg that none of them are doping.  Which is more than I can say for anyone from Russia - who, ironically, competes for the national Olympic committee as opposed to the country because of a ban on Russia for, well, doping.

I'm confused too.