Things I know, and you should
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The whole nine meters.....
1. If there were any doubt about how NBC looks at swimming and track, this should answer it: On the day of the men’s 100-meter final at the track trials, NBC’s lead Olympic talent (that’s TV talk, folks), Bob Costas, was at the swimming trials.
2. It’s nice that Dara Torres, whose 41-year-old abs are shaped into a grotesque looking six-pack, may inspire women of that age to challenge themselves. But the idea that Torres is swimming faster than she did 16 years ago defies credulity. Her making the 2000
Olympic team after a virtual eight-year layoff aroused suspicion. Now she is running around declaring loud and often that she can be drug-tested any time, anywhere. Gee, Dara, didn’t Marion Jones beat a few tests, too? And why does most of the media give swimming a pass on doping?
3. High-tech is nice, but the new swimsuits are so obviously providing the athletes unnatural advantages that all the world records being set are meaningless. The guy who called them ‘technological doping’’ was right.
4. I can’t get excited about middle distance runner Bernard Lagat and his attempt to represent the U.S. team at the 2008 Olympics. Lagat concealed the real date of his acquiring U.S. citizenship (until the Chicago Tribune revealed it) so he could still run for his native Kenya at the 2004 Olympics. Last summer, when Lagat won world titles for the U.S. in the 1,500 and 5,000 at the world championships, he gave squirrelly answers to the question of switching allegiances, but the truth apparently was he thought he no longer would be good enough to make the Kenyan team in 2008.
5. Tyson Gay’s humility is no put-on. NBC asked him after the 100 if his stunning time sent a message to Jamaican rivals Usain Bolt and Asafa Powell, and Gay answered that they probably took notice, but he also noticed how well they were running.
6. Pollution, algae, planned snooping on visitors, human rights abuses -– and the reason Beijing got the Olympics was? Only a horrible natural disaster, the earthquake in Sichuan province, has spared China more of the criticism that was intensifying day-by-day in late winter.
7. The Republic of South Florida could field quite an Olympic track team. Lauryn Williams (Pittsburgh native but full-fledged Miamian now) finished third in the 100 meters. Walter Dix (Coral Springs) was second in the men’s 100. Bershawn Jackson (Miami) won the men’s intermediate hurdles, and Tiffany Ross-Williams (Miami), who missed the 2004 trials because she was pregnant, won the women’s hurdles. Then there are Fort Lauderdale area preps Sanya Richards, favored to win the 400, and Dana Pounds, who led the javelin qualifying.
8. More good news for cycling. The 2008 Tour de Farce begins Saturday. Its defrocked 2006 champion, Floyd Landis, found out Monday he had lost the final appeal of his doping case.
9. Landis and Marion Jones would be a lot more sympathetic characters if they would just fess up. Jones, who is in prison for lying to federal agents, has admitted to only a small part of her doping. Landis remains trapped by his own denials. The truth would set both free.
-- Philip Hersh
