As The Tokyo Olympics Near the End . . .

First of all, Allyson Felix won a two more career Olympic medal for a total of eleven, a bronze medal in the 400m race and a gold in the women's 4x400 relay race on a team that was rounded out by Sydney McLaughlin, Dalilah Muhammad, and Athing Mu. This makes Felix the most decorated American track Olympian ever.  And if that weren't enough, Jessica Springsteen earned a silver model in equestrian team jumping. 

Taking bronze medals home to America are Simone Biles on the balance beam and the U.S. women's soccer team while Canada won the gold medal in women's soccer.  And in case you missed it (and you did, because all sports talk these past few weeks has been about the Olympics), the U.S. men's soccer team won the CONCACAF Gold Cup.  Amazing - they could actually be contenders in the 2022 World Cup!

The men's soccer Olympic tournament?  I don't want to talk about it.  (That is, Brazil won.)

Also, congratulations to two more bronze medalists - Molly Seidel in the women's marathon and Paul Chelimo in the man's 5,000m track race.

That out of the way, the turn for the worse in all things COVID requires me to address the Winter Olympics in Beijing.  First of all, despite COVID, they're still on.  Second of all, because the Delta variant made it over from India to China in a spectacular example of what I regard as karma, China is suffering a major outbreak they haven't seen since the Communist government invented the pandemic. Third, despite the delta corona, China is set - dead set - on having the Winter Games in 2022, as scheduled, rather than 2023 (and the pandemic should definitely be over by then).   Needless to say, a lot of people in the West and Americans in particular are ticked off about all this, and bipartisan group of lawmakers in Washington are trying to get the Winter Games postponed, canceled or moved.  Not just over COVID, but for persecution of the Uighurs un Sinkiang, threats against Taiwan, the crackdowns in Hong Kong, and everything else.   

Good luck with that. The Chinese have so much power and influence that they can get away with anything, and nothing is going to stop the Communist government from Beijing in the first place having the Winter Games in Beijing on schedule.  Nothing stopped them from getting the 2022 Winter Games in the first place, despite the fact that Beijing hosted the Summer Games only a decade or so ago.  Certainly not a bid for the 2022 Winter Games from the only other city interested  - Almaty in Kazakhstan.  So, once again, we'll have to watch athletes competing in empty stands and officials not just in face coverings but presumably, because they'll be outside at skiing and bobsled events, hazmat suits.  (Respiratory viruses can spread much faster outdoors in winter weather.)  

Oh yeah, I just found this out about the Winter Games.  Remember when winter Olympiads were only ten days?  That all changed when the organizers of the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary expanded the duration of those Games to sixteen days in part to make room for more winter sports but also to add an additional weekend of competition to please corporate TV sponsors.  And once Winter Olympiads got staggered in alternate even-numbered years, they may have become more important, but they also became more bloated.  In some respects, the change from ten to sixteen days was necessary; the Winter Olympics had gained such scant attention before 1988 that the International Olympic Committee considered getting rid of them all together.  But given that we are now seeing major cities rather than cozy mountain hamlets hosting the Winter Games - the 2026 Winter Olympics will be hosted by two Italian cities, Cortina d'Ampezzo and Milan (Cortina d'Ampezzo alone was enough for the 1956 Winter Games) - was it worth it?

Right. I've been arguing against Beijing hosting the 2022 Winter Olympics since long before COVID hit, mainly because the climate in northeastern China will require a lot of artificial snow to make it work, but now for many more reasons.  I still say, move them to Almaty - as Borat would say, Winter Olympics for make benefit glorious nation of Kazakhstan!

Nice! 

       

Keeping (and Losing) Track

As exciting as it was to see Ashton Eaton win the decathlon at the Olympics for the second time in a row, Usain Bolt's follow-up victories in the men's 200-meter race and the 4x100-meter relay, winning three gold medals in the Rio Olympics and nine overall, were amazing.  The man from D'yer Mak'er is now one of the most successful Olympic track  stars of all time.  He's retiring after this.  Pity.

Meanwhile, in the women's 4x100-meter relay, the U.S. team won a stunning gold-medal victory in the outer lane after having to do a do-over to qualify when a Brazilian runner interfered with Allyson Felix (the U.S. women had to run by themselves against the clock in the do-over).  The team - Felix, Tianna Bartoletta (who, before she got married, was Tianna Madison, the name you might remember her by), English Gardner (speaking of names, the most memorable name since Krystal Ball), and  Tori Bowie - poured it on in the final and won in stunning fashion.

Their male counterparts, incidentally, lost just as stunningly.  They were never going to win over a Jamaican (a D'yer Mak'in?) team anchored by Usian Bolt, but they were able to do well enough to settle for bronze.  Then the roof caved in; it turned out that leadoff runner Mike Rodgers handed the baton off to Justin Gatlin outside the space allotted on the track, causing them to be disqualified.  This is the second consecutive Olympiad in which the American men's 4x100-meter relay team has been disqualified from the event final and the ninth time overall it's had a disqualification or baton screw-up in World Championships or Olympic competition since 1995. (The team didn't make the final at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing because they dropped the baton in . . . a qualifier.)

Girls rule, boys drool?  In the 4x100-meter track relay race, the boys don't just drool, they slobber like St. Bernards.  Last night on the PBS NewsHour, Christine Brennan, noting that the American women win a sizable majority of gold medals - 61 percent - for Team USA, said that, because of Title IX (you know what that is, I won't repeat it), we should get used to that.  But that 61-39 ratio is not just the result of more American women winning.  It's also the result of more American men . . . losing.  Because American men aren't losing to women in the Olympics, of course.  Indeed, some of these guys are defeating themselves.  

While I'm here, I need to drool a bit about my typos from my previous post about Allyson Felix and other track competitors.  I referred to 40-meter and 300-meter races;  they were, respectively, 400-meter and 3000-meter races, the 90 percent reductions the results of missing zeroes.  The original errors were corrected. 

Taking a Dive

Allyson Felix, already the most decorated female American Olympic athlete in track and field, was a moment away from a fifth career gold medal in the women's 400-meter race.  She lost it when Shaunae Miller of the Bahamas suddenly leaped out over the finish line and crossed it first by landing on it.

Miller apparently forgot that she was a track runner and not a diver.

This was so unfair. Felix was in gold medal position; she should have won.  Miller made a last-minute move that was so underhanded, I stopped working on an freelance article for a moment just to go on Facebook and complain about it.  Even more people, I understand, complained about it on Twitter.

There's just one thing; what Miller did was legal.

Yes!  Apparently, Olympic track runners can hurl themselves over the line, provided they don't impede their competitors. And yes, Americans have done this too; David Neville won the bronze medal in the men's 400-meter race at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.  Well, that wasn't fair, either, so don't accuse me of Yankee imperialism by making the case for Felix.  I heard she was tearful over the result - oh, great, now the press will call her a sore loser - and I, quite frankly, don't blame her for being upset.    

But at least she won the silver medal.

Some more good news: American Clayton Murphy won the bronze in the men's 800-meter race, while American Emma Coburn won the bronze in the women's 3000-meter (three-kilometer) steeplechase, the first American woman to win an Olympic medal in a steeplechase event.