Month: August 2004 (Page 1 of 3)

The US team beat this year’s goal of 100 medals but there was still room for concern. Some medals that should have been locks were either missed or not the preferred color. The first week of the competition, NBC had a poll question on what you want most from the US team. The most medals, good sportsmanship, or no hint of scandal. Something generic like that. In my world, I want a combination. I want the most medals possible, since we have the best combination of population, athletic training for kids, and financial backing. However, I don’t want domination to come at the cost of ‘roid ravaged athletes. Also, I want athletes who perform with honor, style, and class. I want them to win and lose gracefully. I can’t say I was terribly disappointed this year in any of those areas.
With the 2008 games being held in Beijing, you know the Chinese “sports medicine” machine is already working on ways to ensure they can dominate every sport in four years. In terms of simple population, the Chinese should be our biggest threat in the medal count, so if they pass us, I’m not worried. What worries me is we’re being beat down by smaller challenges, making it easier for China to catch us. Here’s my threat scale, and how I think we can deal with them.
Russia: Under the old Soviet sports machine, they routinely beat us. Losing all the former republics has eaten into their medal count, but it’s still impressive. Despite their lack of funding (at least compared to the bad old days) they had an excellent performance in Athens. Still a formidable, if weakening, opponent.

Germany: What happened here? West Germany used to have pretty insane medal numbers per their population. East Germany, of course, was the cheatingest pack of cheaters the games has ever seen. Unification, even with clean athletes, should have created a juggernaut. I think Germans are too busy trying to convince the rest of Europe they don’t ever intend to invade again, and thus have lost some of their killer instinct. No threat.

Jamaica: Our biggest threat on the track as they’re legitimate challengers in every sprint event. Ben Johnson and Donovan Bailey were native Jamaicans, proving how deep the threat is. The population is less than three million. It’s an island in the Caribbean. We’ve got a Republican in the White House. The answer is obvious: invade!!! Bring back the days of gunboat diplomacy, this time in the name of track and field dominance rather than United Fruit! We’ve done it before, we can do it again.

Australia: Truly my biggest concern. They’ve become our equals in the pool. They out-medaled us 6-0 in diving. They challenged our women’s basketball, soccer, and softball teams. They played for the baseball gold medal while our team didn’t even make the games. Their performance on the track had gotten much better, are the leaders in the triathlon, and impressed in beach volleyball. Yet you can’t hate the Aussies. With almost 20 million fun loving people, not to mention a powerful military, they’re too big and strong to invade. Anheiser-Busch is the largest brewer of beer in the world, though. Aussies love beer. Rather than make more shitty commercials, perhaps the geniuses in St. Louis can come up with a plan of inebriating the entire island just before the ’08 games to free up about 40 medals.

As sports changes, what should we expect for overall US performance? Here’s my plan:
1- We should dominate all sprint events in every sport. We’re Americans. We do everything fast. There’s no excuse for losing a sprint whether it’s to close a business deal, cure cancer, or win a foot race.
2- Anything involving guns or archery equipment should be a clean sweep. I saw Bowling for Columbine; I know we shoot things better than any other nation.
3- Any sport we invented or perfected, we should be playing for the gold medal every four years. That means basketball, volleyball (indoor and beach), baseball, and softball are ours. Any sports that are featured at 75% of high schools we should be in medal contention for. That includes all field events, wrestling, soccer, all swimming events not included in the sprints, tennis, and so on.
4- Any strange sport that can only be played professionally in Europe we should not concern ourselves with. Team handball will always be the ultimate example of this. Let the Euros too soft to play Continental hoops satisfy themselves here.

Finally, some clean up of the Games’ roster is in order. I propose the following eliminations:
1- Race walking. Walking is a fine way for regular people to maintain fitness and lose weight. Not everyone is interested in running, or perhaps they have physical problems that prohibit moving faster than 12:00/mile pace. That’s fine; I applaud people who make an effort to keep themselves in shape. But walking should not be an Olympic sport. These are finely tuned athletes. They need to move their asses or stay home. This seems like another sport made up for people who aren’t quite good enough to make the cut in a real event.
2- Trampoline. See above and last week’s comments.
3- Rhythmic gymnastics. Arguably the dumbest sport ever. There’s actually a team event now, and one part of it is called “Hoops and Balls”. That’s right, Hoops and balls. Why don’t we make Jacks an Olympic sport while we’re at it? How can a sport in which five girls run different directions be scored fairly? They can’t even judge one guy on a high bar correctly, there’s no way they can tell whether five tiny girls from Siberia are in synch.
4- Baseball. Any sport only played at a world-class level in half a dozen countries doesn’t deserve inclusion. Thankfully, it sounds like the IOC may be eliminating baseball for the ’08 games. Get the World Cup in place so we can watch Pedro pitch to Barry and forget about trying this in the Olympics ever again. I really don’t need to see the Dutch and Italians booting the ball around the infield while the US is sitting at home.
5- Boxing. It was once one of the Games’ glamour events. Now, outside Cuba, no one really cares. A nice way to further isolate Fidel and his cronies. As Roy Jones, Jr will testify, the scoring is even worse than in professional boxing.

Synchronized swimming was on the list, but the rather striking faux-lesbian imagery that’s been added to the program has forced me to change my tune.

Another Olympiad has come to an end, meaning I no longer have 19 hours of guaranteed watchable TV each day. It’s also a time to reflect on what happened over the past two weeks, and what needs to be changed for the future. This is part one, part two will be posted manana.

To the world’s horror, what we feared most happened Sunday. The renegade Irish priest who has been holding the world hostage these past three years struck again. It’s sad when our worst fears come true.

One final bit on the US men’s basketball team before I drop it. The bronze medal game had something for everyone. Uninspired play by the US through much of the first three quarters, highlighting one last time all the areas those of us who have been critical of for the tournament. In the fourth quarter, the light finally went on, they began playing stifling defense, concentrated on truly sharing the ball rather than seeing who could throw the best behind-the-back pass, and lo and behold, three pointers started dropping. Larry Brown finally found a lineup that worked in Marbury, Iverson, Odom, Marion, and Duncan and the US cruised to the win. Any hope for the future was destroyed when David Stern mentioned Vince Carter as a player who could have helped this year’s squad. Vince Carter?!?!? Another overrated “athlete” who couldn’t hit a clutch jumper if the fate of the world relied on it? Oh, but VC is marketable, so the commish had to push his name.
Also, regarding Jason Whitlock’s assertion that criticism of this year’s team was based on racism, who are the four players most often mentioned as guys who could have helped this team? Ray Allen, Michael Redd, Rip Hamilton, and Tayshaun Prince. Brothers all around. I know Jason’s assertion was based more on style of play criticism, but add two of the four shooters named above, Duncan can get loose inside, we can force the zones to guard the perimeter, and the slashers can actually find room to operate. Gold medal, team racial balance not altered in any way.

I give NBC a B+ for its coverage this year. The use of their various cable outlets to show as much action as possible was a tremendous move, rewarding the interested viewer. They’ve come a long way since their Triple Cast concept in 1992. However, far too many interesting events were still condensed into a neat 10-minute package that showed who won the gold and how the key US performers fared. I realize they’re focusing on the big US picture, but why not use the USA Network to show every second of non-prime track and field events? You can still share a five-minute summary in prime time to split up the 157 hours of gymnastics, and those of us who would like to see the entire long jump event get satisfaction.
Another quibble is how NBC treated taped events as live. In a US volleyball game that ended 12 hours earlier, and NBC missed points during commercial breaks as if the action was live. If you’ve got 12 hours to edit and plan, you can do better than to have the game be tied at 22 after a commercial when the US was up 21-19 before the commercial.
There were plenty of clunkers on the mic for NBC, the worst absolutely had to be the guy doing the interviews at the track and field stadium. After the first night, couldn’t they have sent an intern down to write some decent questions for him? Or put Bob Costas in his earpiece with some questions that made sense? It’s a tough job, but I think NBC did pretty well this time around.

Forget beach volleyball, all the men out there should have been watching women’s field hockey for the last two weeks. I watched the second half of the gold medal match between Germany and the Netherlands last night and was very impressed by the Dutch team. Then again, went aren’t Dutch women impressive? Less skin than on the beach, to be sure, but for the most part these looked like regular hot girls you’d see at happy hour. Their uniforms could probably be worn out to bars, in fact. It’s really a stupid game, though, so it’s a good thing there was plenty of eye candy. From what I gathered, a bunch of women run around hunched over for an hour. If they’re lucky enough to gain possession of the ball, they wind up and send a wicked pass towards a teammate that is 50 yards away. The poor receiver, only having a stunted hockey stick to control the ball, usually either loses the pass out of bounds, or pops it straight up in the air. I’m really not sure how three goals were scored yesterday, as it doesn’t seem possible to possess the ball long enough.

Something else that cracked me up about field hockey was the massive amount of support for the Dutch team. There were literally thousands of orange-clad fans acting wacky as Dutch fans are wont to do. When the Germans pulled off the massive upset of the two time defending gold medalists, these people looked like me after a KU loss in March. They sat in the stands in stunned silence, with either looks of complete disgust or utter shock. I had no idea field hockey had such devoted fans. Maybe the team nudes up if they win and that’s why the fans were so bummed.

A final note regarding beach volleyball wear, I’ve not watched an AVP match in a long time, but I recall in the mid-90s the men generally played without shirts. Not sure why they’re required to wear them in the Olympics if the women are required to wear bikini bottoms. I’m all for making the female viewers happy if that means I still get to see bikini action.

My favorite name of the Olympics? Australian diver Loudy Tourky. She was born in Israel, which explains why her name isn’t something more traditional of Aussies. It nicely straddles the line between difficult to pronounce, approaching near ridiculousness in appearance, yet retaining a cheery quality at the same time. It makes me think of Thanksgiving.

As if we didn’t know that US television is the strongest force in the Olympics already, we have this year’s uniforms as further proof. I’ve not seen every nation’s jersey, but I’ve yet to see a nation that did not have its name spelled with the Latin alphabet. None of the Slavic nations use Cyrillic letters (Russia vs. whatever it would look like in Russian). None of the Asian nations use their form of writing. None of the Arabic nations have Arabic writing as the prominent feature on their jerseys. Most notably, while Greece’s uniforms say Hellas, it is not spelled in Greek letters. Kind of strange, don’t you think?
The one notable exception is Germany, that historic bastion of respect for other cultures. On many of their uniforms below Deutschland is the Greek spelling of Germany. So bravo to the Germans, I guess.

I keep seeing these commercials for “The All New G6” which feature a snippet from the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” and must admit I’m intrigued. The Clash have licensed the use of their music in ads several times over the years (notably for Levis in the UK in 1991 and for Jaguar two years ago) but interesting that a song that’s been licensed before is being used again. I check the website, hoping this is some cool new European sports car that will revolutionize the auto industry. Nope, it’s a freaking Pontiac; what appears to be the replacement for the Sunfire. Very disappointing.

If nothing else comes out of the US men’s basketball team’s loss to Argentina on Friday, at least we can hope that NBC and all the other media lemmings will drop the label Dream Team from future US national teams. I know David Stern makes calls to them before each tournament reminding them to use the term, but it’s ridiculous to continue to use it.
The term was coined for the 1992 team, which truly was a Dream Team. It was the first team to be comprised of almost entirely NBA players. It featured three of the best players in the history of the game. They were supported by a roster that included no less than seven other members of the NBA’s 50 greatest players list. Other than Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, the roster was full of players that were at the peaks of their respective games. And then there was Michael Jordan, unequalled in any era. Never again will there be a comparable confluence of history, ability, accomplishment, and moment.
It was dumb to call the 1996 team a Dream Team. Once again, the team was made up of some of the best players in the NBA, but the overall talent level came nowhere near 1992’s. It was asinine to call the 2000 Olympic or 2002 World Championship teams Dreams. It’s criminal to label this year’s team with that moniker.
What’s worse is the label now appears to be gender neutral, and the women’s team is automatically called the Dream Team. Now don’t get me wrong, the women are probably a better collection of the best talent our country can offer, and have been performing in a manner that at least puts them in the ballpark for that name. But quick, how many players off the team can you name? Maybe you got Lisa Leslie. I had no idea Sheryl Swoopes was on the team until today. Regardless, they ain’t exactly Jordan, Magic, and Bird, are they? Besides, if there ever truly was a women’s Dream Team, it was in 1984 when Pat Summit coached a team lead by Cheryl Miller and Lynette Woodard, the two greatest players the women’s game has ever seen.
So please, NBC and NBA, put your massive marketing budgets to good use and come up with some other clever way of referring to our national basketball teams.

Props to Stace and Dale for sending out the link to the SI blog.

It seems our occasional French correspondent, Madam LeRiche, has beat me to something I was working on. I had crafted a lengthy announcement Paul Hamm should make each time he’s asked about the scoring controversy. It was closely worded to J’s, although I did not include the option of giving up his gold medal. Rather, I left him open to whatever options the international gymnastics federation thought most appropriate for resolving the crisis in a manner that was fair to all competitors.

What Paul really needs to do is shut up for awhile. His statement yesterday that a review of the South Korean’s performance showed at least one deduction that was missed was totally inappropriate. He needs to let his coach, the US gymnastics federation, and the USOC make these statements. I understand he’s trying to get the point across that reviewing performances after the fact will open a pandora’s box of lunacy, but by him pointing out flaws in his competitors’ routines, it makes him come across like a sore winner.

So from now on, Paul, smile, thank the media for their interest, express your concern over the issues in scoring events consistently and fairly in international competitions, say you believe your performance was worthy of the gold medal, and leave it at that.