The alternate universe of the Olympics
Mark Sappenfield | 08.21.08
Random thoughts from the Main Press Center, where there are 7,000 televisions, each showing a different Olympic event. I swear that one is showing pinochle:
* Michael Johnson says this Olympics has been a disaster for US sprinters. US sprinters have won 15 medals – twice as many as Jamaica. Somehow, both of these sentences are true.
* If the world were made up entirely of Taiwanese people, Su Li-wen would be an Olympic legend today. In a bronze-medal taekwondo match, she fought basically on one leg.
It was like watching the last scene from “Karate Kid” in the Olympics – except she didn’t do that crazy crane thing… and there was no towheaded twerp screaming, “Sweep the legs, Jonny!” to the Croatian girl she was fighting… and she didn’t win.
OK, it was nothing like the “Karate Kid.” But it was still pretty cool. She almost won, and I would not have been surprised to see Mr. Miyagi walk out during the break between periods and do his bizarre clap-the-hands friction massage.
* US women soccer team plays Brazil in World Cup semifinals. Goalkeeper Hope Solo is inexplicably left out of the starting lineup. US loses, 4-0. US plays Brazil in Olympic gold medal match. Hope Solo plays. US wins, 1-0. Hmmm.
* USA Track and Field should petition to add Hope Solo to its men’s and women’s relay teams. Baton-exchange crisis? Solved.
* If pinochle were admitted as an Olympic sport, which nation would that favor? Which nation is a pinochle powerhouse? China, probably.
* I want to know what was in Chinese diver Chen Ruolin’s head tonight.
She is 15. She looks about 12. She is standing 33 feet above a pool. This is her last dive. She is in second place. Until this moment, China has won every gold in the diving program. In two seconds, that streak could end, the hope of China sweeping all eight diving gold medals could end, and it would be her fault. Not one of the 17,000 people in the Water Cube makes a sound.
She dives: 10. 10. 9.5.
She wins.
This stuff is so much better than “Lost.”
* I think Dayron Robles is the most fearsome sprinter in the world today.
I mean, Usain Bolt looks like a sprinter. So when you lose to him, you must be like, “Ok, fine. This guy is eight feet tall and could cover the distance from Dover to Calais in one stride. I can live with that.”
But Robles?
Seriously, who runs a sub-13-second 110 meter hurdles in spectacles? That’s almost like smack talk without saying a word. He’s saying, “I’m going to smoke you over the next 110 meters, and I’m going to look like the IT guy down the hall while I’m doing it.”
That’s serious intimidation.
* Norway beat Korea in the women’s handball semifinal by scoring the winning goal with 0.01 seconds left, meaning Korea is now an official member of the Milorad Cavic/Alain Bernard Club.
* The best thing about these Olympics that you probably have not seen: The US men’s and women’s volleyball teams (not beach). In the women’s semifinal today, the US beat Cuba in three games that were not even remotely close.
Bear in mind, Cuba is to women’s volleyball what Godzilla was to Tokyo. Basically, when you play them, it’s often wisest to run and hide, screaming.
The videotape of the 25-20, 25-16, 25-17 win will be sent to the CERN particle accelerator in Switzerland to determine whether the game actually ruptured the space-time continuum, hurtling the Capital Gymnasium into an alternate universe.
It did, actually. The Olympics.
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A 200 meter Bolt from the blue
Mark Sappenfield | 08.20.08
It is odd to hear Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt profess his love for a distance, as though 655 feet and 327 feet are two blushing girls in chiffon standing on the other side of a dance floor.
But for Bolt, it is unquestionably true.
His 100-meter dash Saturday was a romp – a pajama party to which all Beijing was invited. Tonight, in the 200, Bolt was a man on a mission.
It did not matter that the race was over tens of meters before the finish line – as it was Saturday. This time, there was no coasting, no arms outstretched in boyish elation.
There was only a number: 19.32 seconds – the world-record that Michael Johnson had set at the 1996 Atlanta Games. Bolt was running with a phantom of 12 years past, and the rumble that built in crescendo as he neared the finish line was not merely the crowd, it was Bolt himself, bearing down upon history like a train.
That he won the race – by more than a half second – seemed almost an afterthought. The better measure of the race was that new number: 19.30 seconds.
Bolt bent down to kiss the track, something he did not do Saturday.
The 200 meters is his prom queen – or, perhaps more accurately, his first love.
“The 200 has been my love since I was 15,” he said in a press conference afterward. “I was the youngest ever world junior champion.”
In the 100, he noted, he had the world record even before the Olympics. Now he has the 200 – Olympic gold and world record – to complete the set.
The mere manner of it will raise questions in the summer sport most often linked to doping. In the 100, Bolt shaved only 0.03 seconds off his previous personal best (which happened to be the world record). In the 200, his new world record is 0.37 seconds better than his previous personal best of 19.67 seconds.
But in Bolt’s defense, Johnson did almost exactly the same thing in Atlanta. In June of that year, he set a personal best of 19.66 seconds. Little more than a month later, he ran 19.32 seconds.
Besides, everyone knew Bolt was going to do it eventually. So young, so gifted, and so perfectly built for the 200, Bolt would someday put it all together and “I will be able to kiss my record goodbye,” said Johnson in a pre-race press conference.
Some day came before the night was out.
“I told myself I was going to leave everything on the track,” Bolt said afterward.
Except the world record, of course.
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A new Caribbean Cold War: Jamaican sprinters
Mark Sappenfield | 08.20.08
If America had a Cuban missile crisis, can it have a Jamaican sprinter crisis?
Is President Bush even now considering a blockade of Kingston harbor to ensure that the reggae runners are never again dispatched to an international meet?
For 12 days, American angst has focused on the host nation almost lapping us in the gold medal race. Tonight confirmed the greater immediate danger much closer to home.
Since the sprinting program began Friday, the Jamaicans have treated America less kindly than Nikita Khrushchev treated his shoe, winning the men’s 100 meters, sweeping the women’s 100 meters, and now taking the men’s 200 meters.
What medals has China taken from the US? Two gymnastics medals, tops, and perhaps a few others sprinkled here and there.
Jamaica has launched a sortie of missiles clad in banana-colored tracksuits directly toward the America’s Olympic heart.
Tonight, a matter of minutes after another Usain Bolt struck – winning the 200 meters in world-record time – another Jamaican, Melanie Walker, raced past another American, Sheena Tosta, in a race Walker confesses she has always hated, the 400 meter hurdles.
Where do they get all these sprinters?
Wait, isn’t that what the world has always said about the US?
Sprinting has always been an American gold-medal trove. The country is by no means doing badly, but it is nowhere near its normal standards.
Before the 200 meter dash, former world record holder Michael Johnson said: “Up to this point, it has been a disastrous Olympics for the US. In the 100 meter we won only one medal [a bronze]… We’re used to dominating the event.”
When the US protested the results of the 200 tonight, it had the scent of frustration. The judges had disqualified the third person to cross the finish line, American Wallace Spearmon, because he had stepped into an inside lane.
The fourth- and fifth-place finishers were both Americans, so that was OK, really. Another American would move up into the bronze-medal slot. But the US claimed that second-place finisher Churandy Martina of the Netherlands Antilles had also stepped out of his lane.
The video evidence, which I have not yet seen, was apparently convincing. Martina, too, was disqualified, giving the US silver and bronze.
Yet it was a peculiar situation for the US – being the country at the bottom of the medal podium looking up, questioning results that did not go its way.
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Iceland’s handball Vikings seek to plunder gold
Mark Sappenfield | 08.20.08
A quick look at Iceland’s medal table:
Zero gold, 1 silver, 2 bronze.
Ever.
Standing in the lobby of the handball arena, Magnus Bjarnason counts them on his fingers: triple jump in 1952, judo in 1984, pole vault in 2000.
He has memorized all the Olympic medalists in his country’s history.
Almost. The triple jump silver was actually in 1956.
But that is why he is here – and happy. Today, Iceland beat Poland in the quarterfinals of the men’s handball tournament.
If you don’t know what handball is, that’s not terribly important. Just think of it as water polo played on land. Moving on, the rather more important fact, is that Iceland is in the semifinal of an Olympic sport.
If you built four Bird’s Nests (and China would probably be willing to do it, if the Icelanders asked politely), you could fit Iceland’s 300,000 people with 64,000 seats to spare.
Put another way, when the 15 men of the handball team left for Beijing, 0.005 percent of the population departed. If you did an all-time per capita Summer Olympics medal table, Iceland’s three medals would be one-quarter more than America’s 2,177 pre-Beijing medals.
Did I mention there aren’t many people in Iceland?
And can you begin to understand why Magnus Bjarnason is bouncing around with men in fuzzy blue-and-red Viking helmets, yelping his head off?
The kitschy helmets are redundant, really. This is the land of no last names – so faithful to its Viking language and heritage that every one is known as so-and-so’s son or daughter. Magnus Bjarnason’s son, standing beside him, is Gustav Magnusson.
And he is happy, too.
Having beaten Poland (population 39 million), can Iceland beat Spain (population 40 million) and secure at least a silver? Could the team even win the country’s first gold medal?
“We can win anything,” says Bjarnason.
His optimism is not merely the euphoria of the moment. Iceland is fairly good at handball, a sport played almost exclusively in Europe. And it has been here once before. It finished fourth in the Barcelona Games. But that was Iceland’s best-ever result in a major international handball tournament.
In the worst-case scenario, the team has at least matched that.
Best case?
“It would be 15 gold medals, because everyone on the team gets one,” reasons Bjarnason.
When you’ve got fewer people than Toledo, Ohio, you’ve got to fight for every medal you can get.
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When Messi plays, soccer becomes the ‘beautiful game’
Mark Sappenfield | 08.19.08
Admittedly, it is sometimes hard to love the game of soccer. The joys of the “beautiful game” are rarely as obvious as a slam dunk or a touchdown pass.
So often they come in the subtlety of a back heel, the precision of an 80-yard pass hitting someone precisely in stride, the rhythmic ebb and flow of a game without commercial interruption.
Yet when Lionel Messi steps on the field, soccer needs no explanation.
The Argentine winger scored no goals in tonight’s 3-0 semifinal demolition of archrival Brazil. Yet even in what was – for him – a rather ordinary performance, he was the one player on the field who brought a collective intake of breath from 53,000 people every time he touched the ball.
At times, he looks like a mogul skier, weaving between defenders who appear almost stationary. At others, it seems that he must surely have magnets in his shoes, emerging from a tangle of bodies, the ball still somehow on his feet.
A little like baseball, soccer can be more about what goes wrong than what goes right. Just as a great hitter fails to get on base 60 percent of the time, great soccer teams spend 88 minutes of a game not scoring – and often not coming close.
But in Messi, the beauty of the beautiful game is more apparent. Usually, the goals do come. But even when they do not, there is still a purpose in his every step. There is not a nil-nil bone in Messi’s body.
What others dare not attempt for lack of skill – running full speed at defenses with the ball on their foot – he has made an art form, slippery as a bar of soap, composed as a conductor with his baton and tails.
This is the most precious of soccer gifts, and it is rare. One of Messi’s opponents tonight, Ronaldinho, used to be such a player. Perhaps he can be again. But on this night, there was no question who was the more feared – or adored.
At midnight Friday, East Coast time, Messi will take the field in the gold-medal match against Nigeria. The Chinese crowd will call MES-SI as they always do, and opposing defenders will seem to be on their heels from the moment the national anthems end, as they also always do.
In an Olympics that has given us the liquid strides of Jamaican sprinters, the incomparable precision of Chinese divers, and the amazing Michael Phelps, it is only fitting the soccer’s finale will bring us Argentina’s little maestro one last time.
