Olympics Lessons

Olympic observations  http://www.youtube.com/olympic

Yellow Peril
Asians have colonised the world.
Table tennis - chinamen were playing for countries from Poland and Spain to USA
badminton - dark haired Belgian quite good - at back of jersey 'Tan'!
Indian Yap?
South Africa track suit (Erke); US women 3M springboard synchronised silver medals jackets Nike but diving suits Li Ning & 1 Chinaman coach (American 'patriots' would go crazy...)

Where 007 Dare Not Go
Shooting - air rifle 1st gold or tournament went to Chinese woman
Air pistol gold - China woman
Skeet shooting gold went to US woman who shot 97 of 98. 2nd china 91/98
1992 olympic gold winner Chinese woman even though it was all-sex event (after that yr ISSF changed to one-sex only)

Brute Force vs Fine Precision
South Korean women won every olympic gold (7 times) and the current tean won all 3 world chammpionships they participated in (2009,10,11)
2012 medal winners - Korea, China, Japan - Russia 2 mongolian girls
weather affects scores greatly: gold medal match rain start avg 7 pts each vs 9/10 usual
Final game rain: 1 Korean & 1 chinese girl shot at center for 10 pts (even men gold medal game with fine weather could not match)
Women 3M springboard Synchronised diving - chinese women; US AUS coaches chinamen
Spain men archery coach: Yellow man; Italy women - Korean woman

Women against the odds (according to history)
Japanese women football team asssigned economy class while men team business (same flight) because men were professionals; 'at least we are more senior by age'
reigning world champions; one head shorter than Canadian & Swedishwomen
"It should have been the other way around," 2011 FIFA women's world player of the year Homare Sawa told Japanese media after arriving in the French capital. "Even just in terms of age we are senior."
all smiles even though they drew their first game
Japanese 'customs' that define their history: women are 2nd class
Aus women basketball team same: women 'by far the more successful' & won silver in last 3 Olympics; men none


Some Men are full of themselves
showboating in football - Brazilian men do Bolt show;
Japanese football women team all only smiles after their game
weightlifting 53kg women - Kazakh girl Zulfiya Chinshanlo turned 19 4 days before she won gold & broke world record; while she spoke on phone to her president her coach kept hogging camera & shouting 'Kazakhstan number 1'. On rostrum all she did was busily wiping tears off her face - no Bolt show off

Blackman Can't Run and Play Basketball
Women 2nd Olympic 100m gold - Shelly-Ann Fraser 'tiny' 'dimunitive shortest girl; all finalists blacks!
ABA (1967-76) - freewheeling style caught on with fans; financial losses due to lack of TV contracts
UK 10km men gold; women heptathlon gold - blacks

1st Women reps to Olympics
Saudi; must be accompanied by 'their men'; end slavery 1960
God's history?

Pariah nation
North Korean girl weightlifting - jerk 2nd try OK overturned, 3rd try OK 'took forever' (TV commentator)

Beach volleyball should be renamed
Too many round things to look at...
Beach volleyball - women in bikinis; no muslim country involved

French swordsmen have 15 lives
gold medal match : Hungarian leading 7-0 in 10 seconds (3 3 mins bouts)

Rules Can Be Changed
Archery: used to be all shots get counted but since Koreans kept winning and blowing their competitors away, the rules were changed to best of 5 sets systems and as result one can afford a couple of bad shots and still win. Men individual: French lost to Myanmar after draw by best of one shot - damn arrogant when conceding defeat because he was supposed to be the favorite and Myanmarese got into competition via 'wild card' scheme

Time is relative
Women epee SF Korean & German 2008 Olympic gold drawing 5-5 with 1 sec left; Koreans claim German 6th pt came after 1 sec was over (clock button controlled by time referee) - never bet on anything that involves a man!
to lodge official complaint must deposit money - girls waited for 1 hour on piste (fencing platform)
Both ladies lost their final games (gold & bronze) - Korean girl to China's world no 1

Cheating Chinamen
16 yr old girl won gold in 400 medley and broke 1st world record in 2012 Olympics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArKGCqlVbLQ
She swam last 50m freestyle in 28.93 sec - 0.17s faster than man winner in same race (Ryan Lochte - new michael phelps)
Phelps 19 medals - unbelievable; Next highest Russian woman gymnast 18 medals
Top women in 4x100m freestyle (medalists: AUS,NED,US) were all swimming their 'last 50m' in under 28s! leading swimmers on first 2 legs (until overtaken by young Aus girl in 3rd leg) were US
Sun Yang: 1500m freestyle WR holder broke his own WR record again (unbleievable!) and does first 800m at avg 58s every 100m
Frenchman Florent Manaudou won 50m dash but all finalists under 22s
Women 50m: top 6 finalists below 25s; all 8 below 26s
Women 4x100m relay: US gold team slightly more than 29s every 50m

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/jul/30/ye-shiwen-world-record-olympics-2012

China has become embroiled in the first doping controversy of the London Games after one of the world's most respected coaches described the swimming prodigy Ye Shiwen's gold medal performance as "unbelievable" and "disturbing".

The American John Leonard, executive director of the World Swimming Coaches Association, said the 16-year-old's performance was "suspicious" and said it brought back "a lot of awful memories" of the Irish swimmer Michelle Smith's race in the same event at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. Smith, now Michelle de Bruin, was banned for four years in 1998 after testing positive for an anabolic steroid.

Ye stunned world swimming on Saturday by winning gold in the 400m individual medley in a world-record time. It was her final 100m of freestyle, in which she recorded a split time of 58.68sec, that aroused Leonard's suspicion. Over the last 50m she was quicker than the American Ryan Lochte, who won the men's 400m individual medley in the second-fastest time in history .

"We want to be very careful about calling it doping," said Leonard, who is also the executive director of the USA Swimming Coaches Association.
"The one thing I will say is that history in our sport will tell you that every time we see something, and I will put quotation marks around this, 'unbelievable', history shows us that it turns out later on there was doping involved. That last 100m was reminiscent of some old East German swimmers, for people who have been around a while. It was reminiscent of the 400m individual medley by a young Irish woman in Atlanta."
Leonard is the first major figure in the swimming world to go public with suspicions over Ye's performance. London 2012 organisers and the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) have insisted that anyone cheating at the Games would be caught, with a record 6,250 tests being carried out.
About half of the 10,500 athletes, including all medal winners, will be tested for 240 banned substances. But Wada has also repeatedly raised concerns about athletes who may be successfully doping out of competition, drawing a distinction between them and "dopey dopers" who are caught during a major championships.
Stephanie Rice, the Australian who won gold in both women's medley events in Beijing in 2008, described Ye's performance as "insanely fast". Ariana Kukors, the 2009 world 200m medley champion from the US, has said it was "amazing" and "unbelievable".
Leonard, who said Ye "looks like superwoman" added: "Any time someone has looked like superwoman in the history of our sport they have later been found guilty of doping."
His comments are liable to further increase tensions between China – which has poured huge resources into its sporting programmes in recent years and topped the US in the medal table for the first time in Beijing four years ago – and the Americans.
Ye was more than seven seconds faster in the Olympic 400m individual medley final than she had been in the World Championship equivalent last July.
Leonard said that although this vast improvement was possible, it would be very hard to achieve. "But the final 100m was impossible. Flat out. If all her split times had been faster I don't think anybody would be calling it into question, because she is a good swimmer. But to swim three other splits at the rate that she did, which was quite ordinary for elite competition, and then unleash a historic anomaly, it is just not right."
Asked about the accusation that she was doping, Ye replied: "The Chinese team keep very firmly to the anti-doping policies, so there is absolutely no problem."
Leonard also questioned why Ye was not competing in the 200m or 400m freestyle, despite her phenomenal performance in that discipline in the medley, saying that was one of "a whole bunch of other questions".
He has been executive director of the WSCA since 1989. "I have been around swimming for four-and-a-half decades now," he said. "If you have been around swimming you know when something has been done that just isn't right. I have heard commentators saying 'well she is 16, and at that age amazing things happen'. Well yes, but not that amazing. I am sorry."
Leonard said that the consensus in the coaching community he represents was that the swim was "unbelievable". "I use that word in its precise meaning. At this point it is not believable to many people," he added.
"No coach that I spoke to yesterday could ever recall seeing anything remotely like that in a world level competition," Leonard continued. "Where someone could out-split one of the fastest male swimmers in the world, and beat the woman ahead of her by three-and-a-half body lengths. All those things, I think, legitimately call that swim into question."
Ye also won the 200m medley at the World Championships in 2011, and qualified fastest for the semi-finals of that event in Monday morning's heats, in a time that was 1.61sec quicker than her nearest competitor.

Leonard also argued that it was fair to point to the positive tests incurred by Chinese athletes in the past. In 2009 five junior Chinese swimmers were banned after testing positive for the anabolic agent clenbuterol at the 2008 national junior championships .

"You can't turn around and call it racism to say the Chinese have a doping history," Leonard said. "That is just history. That's fact. Does that make us suspicious? Of course. You have to question any outrageous performance, and that is an outrageous performance, unprecedented in any way, shape or form in the history of our sport. It by itself, regardless of whether she was Chinese, Lithuanian, Kenyan, or anything else, is impossible. Sorry."
Leonard rejected comparisons to Michael Phelps, who broke the 200m butterfly world record when he was just 15, back in 2001 because the American got "consistently faster every year on a normal improvement curve".
He said he had no qualms about the performance of other Chinese swimmers, including the new Olympic 400m freestyle champion Sun Yang, 20. "He has a perfectly normal improvement curve, he is a dramatically spectacular athlete in our sport and I've no question about him at all. But a woman does not out-swim the fastest man in the world in the back quarter of a 400m IM that is otherwise quite ordinary. It just doesn't happen."
Blood samples taken at these Games will be kept for eight years. "I am sure that Fina and the doping authorities have taken every sample they can take," Leonard said. "The sample will be tested and available for testing for the next eight years. And over eight years, if there is something unusual going on in terms of genetic manipulation or something else, I would suspect over eight years' science will move fast enough to catch it. I have every faith that eventually if there is something there to be caught it will be caught. Right now all we can say is Olympic champion, world record holder, and watch out for history."But Arne Ljungqvist, chairman of the International Olympic Committee's medical commission and a veteran anti-doping official, said that as yet he had no particular suspicions around the Chinese swimmer.
"Should I have my suspicions I keep them for myself, first of all, and take any action, if so, in order to find out whether something is wrong or not. You ask me specifically about this particular swimming. I say no, I have not personally any reason other than to applaud what has happened, until I have further facts, if so."
Ljungqvist added that he was unaware of which athletes had been tested in the build-up to the Games. He described the IOC's mandate as "limited" because its testing programme only covers the period from when the athlete's village opens.

"We have a testing programme, as you know, that covers only the period from the opening of the village until the end of the Games, and any doping programme would probably be put in place long before then," he said. "So our mandate is pretty limited and it is therefore very much a matter of the international federations and the national Olympic committees to make sure that athletes are clean when they come here."
Ljungqvist said that sudden advances in performance could bring athletes under closer scrutiny but said "sport is in danger" if surprise performances automatically provoke suspicion.
"We are using many reasons for having target testing. Of course should a sudden rise in performance occur in a particular person, we could regard that possibly as a reason to do it, but I would rather say that it is tragic if that should be the primary reason for doing a testing."Calls to the Chinese Olympic Committee's listed press attache for the London Games, Zhang Haifeng, went unanswered on Monday.
With athletes willing to cheat caught in an ongoing arms race with anti-doping authorities employing ever more sophisticated means to catch them, they continue to be caught doping. On the eve of the London Games, the International Association of Athletics Federations banned nine athletes.
IOC president, Jacques Rogge, in his opening press conference, said the fact that doping cheats were being caught and banned was a positive sign and said the fact samples would be held for up to eight years was a major deterrent. Three athletes have been sent home for doping offences since the Games began.

"As far as the athletes being caught positive before the Games, this is a good sign for the fight against doping. In all, in total, 107 athletes were caught positive in the two months preceding the Olympic Games," he said.
"We are continuing to test and test and test again before the competition. We will be testing, of course, during the competition, but I will say that this is proof that the system works, that the system is effective and that the system is a deterrent one."
Jeremy Hunt, the culture secretary, said anyone doping at the Games would be caught. "China gets more gold medals than any other country so they're always going to be a target as the top dog. They are outstanding athletes, but we need to remember that this is the most heavily policed Olympics ever in terms of doping," he said. "The regime is incredibly thorough and incredibly strict. So if there are people who are doing what they shouldn't, we can be as confident as we'll ever be that they will be found out."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/london-2012-olympics-blog/2012/jul/29/london-2012-china-ye-shiwen?intcmp=239

The morning after the night before there was only one name on everybody's lips. It was not Ryan Lochte or Michael Phelps. In fact it was exactly the same person those two had been talking about themselves: Ye Shiwen. The 16-year-old, born and raised in Hangzhou out on the east coast of China, became the first swimmer to break a world record at these Olympics when she knocked more than a second off the time that won Steph Rice gold back in Beijing in 2008. And Rice had the advantage of swimming in a polyurethane suit, of the kind long since banned by the sport's governing body, Fina. It was not just Ye's speed, or her age, that was so staggering – it was the manner of her victory.

After 300m of fly, back and breaststroke, Ye was eight-tenths of a second behind USA's world champion, Elizabeth Beisel. And then, with 100m to go, something extraordinary happened. She swam her first 50m of freestyle in 29.25sec, and her second in 28.93. Those are just numbers, and mean little to those who do not study the sport. To put them in context, consider this: Ye was faster in the final 50m of her own 400m IM than Lochte was in his.
"Yeah, we were talking about that at dinner," Lochte said. "It is pretty impressive. She's fast. If she was there with me, she might have beat me." There's no might about it. Ye was 0.17 quicker over the final 50m of freestyle than the man many reckon to be the greatest all-round swimmer in the world. Beisel, Lochte's training partner, had no chance. She was two seconds slower over the final 50m.
It is the first time in history such a thing has happened. But it will not be the last. Ominously, Ye is certain she can get better still, and seeing as she is only 16, who can doubt her? "There's much room for improvement," she said. "It's true for breaststroke I am lagging behind but I think my freestyle result is also not that good. Usually I'm very bad at turning. This is one of my worst basic skills, but turning is a very important skill, therefore I was practising my turns before the competition." She says she is even better at the 200m IM, the event in which she won gold at the world championships in Shanghai last year, when she was 15.
Ye's team-mate Li Xuanxu took bronze and she is only 17 herself. She too came home in under 30 seconds, with a time of 29.77. The next best split was almost a second slower.
Then there was Sun Yang, 20, and also from Hangzhou. The world knew a little more about him, after he beat the longest-standing record in swimming at the world championships last year, taking 0.42 off the 1500m time set by the great Grant Hackett back in 2001.
Sun won the 800m in Shanghai, too. In London he has already won gold and set a new Olympic record in the 400m freestyle, beating South Korea's world and Olympic champion Park Tae-hwan. And on Sunday morning he was the fastest-qualifier in the heats of the 200m freestyle, pipping Lochte. It is entirely possible that Sun will sweep all the freestyle distances from 200m to 1500m.
China's success has prompted, with tedious predictability, dark mutterings about exactly how they are achieving it. Over the course of the 1990s they had 40 swimmers banned after positive doping tests. The sceptics – or perhaps cynics – would say that the doubts about Ye, Li and Sun are the inevitable consequence of that history.
There is, of course, no evidence to support such thoughts other than the talent and speed of the athletes themselves. Surely the success of this young generation stems from a legacy of a very different kind – that of the Beijing Olympics. China has sent 49 swimmers to these Games, and 27 of them were born after 1990. On the women's side, there are eight who were born in 1995 or after. The country's success in the Aquatics Centre surely owes a lot to the investment in the sport made before the 2008 Games.

Their medals could also owe something to the unique talent identification system China uses to stream children into different sports. In his excellent 2003 profile of Yao Ming for the New Yorker, Pete Hessler, talks about how Chinese basketball players are selected strictly on the basis of their height and genealogy. "We go to the schools and look at the children's height, and then we check their parents' height," Hessler was told by one high school coach. "The method of early recruitment is a product of China's inability to provide every public school with coaches and sports facilities," Hessler wrote. "The system has proved effective in low-participation, routine-based sports like gymnastics and diving." And also, it seems, swimming.

Ye says she started swimming in 2003 because her "teacher spotted she had big hands". In swimming, where physique determines so much, the rather-rudimentary method of recruiting young athletes on the basis of their physical characteristics rather than their talent or inclination for the sport, appears to work well. It is coupled, of course, to an infamously fierce training programme, to the point where Ye was asked whether she resented being treated like a robot. "Of course not," she replied. "I think we have very good training, very scientific-based training, that's why we all have progressed."