Katie!

Allow me to play Inspector Clouseau for a moment or two to make the case for Katie Ledecky as the greatest female distance swimmer of her time.

Fact: Katie Ledecky just won the Olympic gold medal for the women's 800-meter freestyle race and set a new world record in the event.

Fact: The record she broke was her own, set in January 2016.

Fact: After she set the Olympic record for the "800 free" at the London Games in 2012, she set the world record in August 2013.  What just happened in Rio marks the fourth time she's broken her own world record.

Fact: She's only the third woman to win back-to-back gold medals in the 800-meter Olympic women's freestyle race.  The first two were Janet Evans (maybe you've heard of her!) in 1988 and 1992 and Brooke Bennett (who I used to dislike, but not anymore, and I explained all that here)  in 1996 and 2000.  

Fact: In the final fifty meters, Ledecky was so far ahead that, at one point, it looked like all of the other swimmers were still going in the other direction.      

Fact: Katie Ledecky just swam eight hectometers to glory. 

Fact: Eight hectometers are the equivalent of eight hundred meters. :-D

King Of the Pool

Lilly King is America's new swimming heroine.

She not only won the gold medal in the 100-meter breaststroke at the 2016 Olympics in Rio, she beat that Russian doper Yulia Efimova to the top of the podium.  And she was very self-righteous about it, as she should be, dissing Efimova for merely being in the race.  I'm glad King beat Efimova and left her with silver, but I'm still offended that Efimova gets a medal of any sort.  

This is not like the doping controversy in women's swimming in the 1996 Olympics, where there were and still are a lot of ambiguities (and I won't bring it up again beyond that, as I promised you all I wouldn't).  This case is far more clear-cut.  Anyone who's followed the story of Russian state-sponsored athlete-doping (have you been paying attention, Donald Trump?) should figure that out. 

Congratulations to American Cody Miller for getting the bronze medal in the 100-meter breaststroke on the men's side.  (Adam Peaty won the gold, natch.)  And also congratulations to Ryan Murphy for striking gold in the men's 100-meter backstroke. 

All Aboard The Night Train!

Oh, this is sweet . . ..

The four-man bobsled team United States 1, whose sled is known as the "Night Train," made history today by speeding to an Olympic gold medal in Vancouver - the first American gold medal in the four-man bobsled event since 1948. Steven Holcomb was the driver, supported by Steve Mesler, Curt Tomasevicz and Justin Olsen. They set the pace in the first of four runs and never looked back. Their final margin of time on the fastest sled track ever built was .38 of a second.

To give you an idea of how significant this is, American bobsledders had long been considered more of a novelty than the Jamaican bobsled team.

The Night Train crew beat a German sled piloted by the esteemed Andre Lange, a friend of Holcomb's. Now the Americans can take their places among great Olympic bobsledders such as Lange, Peter Kirby of Canada, Eugenio Monti of Italy, Jean Wicki of Switzerland, and the Latvian bobsledder Janis Kipurs.

I remember Janis Kipurs, a member of the Soviet team in the 1980s, very well, largely because of his name - pronounced "YON-is KIP-ers." I like saying it over and over - "YON-is KIP-ers." "YON-is KIP-ers." "YON-is KIP-ers." :-D

Of course, Steven Holcomb, Steve Mesler, Curt Tomasevicz and Justin Olsen are four more names worth repeating. :-)