Beijing 2008: The Games of the XXIX Olympiad

[BGMaverick9]

We actually lost softball?????? WHAT?!?!

[Kirobaito]

Originally Posted by BGMaverick9

We actually lost softball?????? WHAT?!?!

I guess I don't know the rules of softball, because we beat them yesterday, but lost to them today, but that means they win the gold medal?

[Usually Lurkin]

Looks like there's an official IOC investigation into the age of the Chinese gymnasts. That might end up the suck for China, who've done a pretty good job of putting on a "new world China" show for all of us.

[Flacolaco]

edit: Actually, do you have a link for that? I don't see it anywhere.

[BGMaverick9]

Originally Posted by Kirobaito

I guess I don't know the rules of softball, because we beat them yesterday, but lost to them today, but that means they win the gold medal?

I think it was something funky where the loser from the day before (Japan) would play in another game vs someone and that winner (Japan) would play the US for the Gold Medal. Just b/c those two teams were so dominant they still could lose one game in the medal tournament, late in it, and they could still be in the Gold Medal game.

I know that is it verbatim, but it was close to that.

[Kirobaito]

Originally Posted by Flacolaco

edit: Actually, do you have a link for that? I don't see it anywhere.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26337759/

Search 'ioc investigation age' and you get numerous things.

[fluid.forty.one]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/o...582421.ece

Sex and the Olympic city
Tomorrow night thousands of young men and women with the most fit, toned bodies in the world will mingle for the last time before they fly home. What might they get up to?
Matthew Syed

I am often asked if the Olympic village - the vast restaurant and housing conglomeration that hosts the world's top athletes for the duration of the Games - is the sex-fest it is cracked up to be. My answer is always the same: too right it is. I played my first Games in Barcelona in 1992 and got laid more often in those two and a half weeks than in the rest of my life up to that point. That is to say twice, which may not sound a lot, but for a 21-year-old undergraduate with crooked teeth, it was a minor miracle.

Barcelona was, for many of us Olympic virgins, as much about sex as it was about sport. There were the gorgeous hostesses - there to assist the athletes - in their bright yellow shirts and black skirts; there were the indigenous lovelies who came to watch the competitions. And then there were the female athletes - literally thousands of them - strutting, shimmying, sashaying and jogging around the village, clad in Lycra and exposing yard upon yard of shiny, toned, rippling and unimaginably exotic flesh. Women from all the countries of the world: muscular, virile, athletic and oozing oestrogen. I spent so much time in a state of lust that I could have passed out. Indeed, for all I knew I did pass out - in a place like that how was one to tell the difference between dreamland and reality?

It was not just the guys. The women, too, seemed in thrall to their hormones, throwing around daring glances and dynamite smiles like confetti. No meal or coffee break was complete without a breathless conversation with a lithe long jumper from Cuba or an Amazonian badminton player from Sweden, the mutual longing so evident it was almost comical. It was an effort of will to keep everything in check until competition had finished. But, once we were eliminated from our respective competitions, we lunged at each other like suicidal fencers. There may have been a fair amount of gay sex going on, too - but given the notorious homophobia in sport it was rather more covert.

This sex fest was not limited to Barcelona: the same thing happened in Sydney in 2000, my second Olympics as an athlete, and is happening right here in Beijing, where this time I'm a commentator. I spoke to an Aussie table tennis player this week to check out the village vibe and he launched into the breathless patter common to any Olympic debutant: “It is unbelievable in there; everyone is totally crazy once they are out of their competitions. God knows what it is going to be like this weekend. It is like a world within a world.” A British runner (anonymous again: athletes are not supposed to talk to journalists unaccompanied by a PR type, least of all about sex) said: “The swimmers finished earlier in the week and it was like there was an eruption.”


Ah yes, the swimmers. For some reason the International Olympic Committee insists on bunching the swimming events towards the beginning of the Games with the inevitable consequence that the aquatics folk get going earlier - sexually I mean - than everyone else. So much so that, at the outset of the Sydney Olympics, Jonathan Edwards, a Christian and triple jumper extraordinaire, caused a ripple by telling them publicly to keep a lid on it. Edwards was simply concerned about getting woken up by creaking floorboards, but given his biblical credentials, it became a story about morality. Not that his intervention made a blind bit of difference. There is a famous story from Seoul in 1988 that there were so many used condoms on the roof terrace of the British team's residential block the night after the swimming concluded that the British Olympic Association sent out an edict banning outdoor sex. Here in Beijing, organisers have realised that such prohibitions are about as useful as banning breathing and have, instead, handed out thousands of free condoms to the athletes. If you can't stop 'em, at least make it safe.

Which all begs a question, or possibly many questions. First, and most importantly, how can one get access to the village? The bad news is that you can't, unless, of course, you happen to be an athlete with the relevant accreditation. But secondly, where does this furnace of sexual energy come from? Or, to put it another way, why do sportsmen and women have such explosive libidos? I am not implying, for one moment, that every athlete in Beijing is at it. Just that 99 per cent of them are.

Before we get to that, however, it is worth noting an intriguing dichotomy between the sexes in respect of all this coupling. The chaps who win gold medals - even those as geeky as Michael Phelps - are the principal objects of desire for many female athletes. There is something about sporting success that makes a certain type of woman go crazy - smiling, flirting and sometimes even grabbing at the chaps who have done the business in the pool or on the track. An Olympic gold medal is not merely a route to fame and fortune; it is also a surefire ticket to writhe.

But - and this is the thing - success does not work both ways. Gold-medal winning female athletes are not looked upon by male athletes with any more desire than those who flunked out in the first round. It is sometimes even considered a defect, as if there is something downright unfeminine about all that striving, fist pumping and incontinent sweating. Sport, in this respect, is a reflection of wider society, where male success is a universal desirable whereas female success is sexually ambiguous. I do not condone this phenomenon, merely note it. Not all athletes are finely tuned specimens of perfect physical health, of course. A fair number are smokers, not prepared to give up despite the nagging of coaches and physiologists. At Barcelona, there was an area where the puffers would congregate near the transport mall. At the table tennis events in Beijing, a male player from Serbia and another from Greece have often been out catching a drag during breaks in play.

But let us get back to all the sex going down in the village. One possible explanation centres on the fact that Olympic athletes have to display an unnatural (and, it has to be said, wholly unhealthy) level of self-discipline in the build-up to big competitions. How else is this going to manifest itself than with a volcanic release of pent-up hedonism? It is a common sight to see recently knocked-out athletes gorging on Magnums and McDonald's, swilling alcohol and, of course, shagging like crazy. Sometimes all three at the same time. Yet this can be only a part of the explanation because most of the athletes I know are as up for it before and during competition as they are in the immediate aftermath. It is as if sportsmen and women have a higher base level of sexual energy. But why? Can it be that one of the underlying drivers of sporting greatness is also the very thing that produces an overactive sex drive?

If so, you can bet your Olympic accreditation that testosterone is implicated. Testosterone is the hormone responsible for many of the differences between the sexes and is also a key physiological driver of aggression, competitiveness and virility. This is particularly so with regard to women. The duel effect of testosterone on female sporting performance and sexuality was demonstrated - somewhat sinisterly - during the state-sponsored doping programme in East Germany. An average teenage girl produces around half a milligram of testosterone per day. In the mid-1980s German female athletes were doped with around 30 milligrams of androgenic steroids per day. The effect on sporting performance was breathtaking - East German women dominated the world in swimming and athletics - but it also produced libidos (according to the testimony of the athletes themselves) that spiraled out of control.

This is not to say that the athletes in the village are all on steroids, or that elevated levels of testosterone inevitably lead to lots of sex. It is merely to say that, at a population level, higher naturally occurring levels of testosterone in both genders would provide a powerful explanation for the combination of sporting prowess and sexual potency.

I also think it is significant that, for most athletes, the village is thousands of miles from home. The old “what goes on tour stays on tour” mantra is still alive and kicking, not just in sport but beyond. There is something deepseated in humanity that leads us to play by different rules whenever we leave town, a phenomenon that has caused instances of terrible inhumanity. When it comes to sex, it simply means that those in relationships no longer recognise, or at least ignore, the boundaries of fidelity and honesty that underpin human monogamy. Philosophers call it moral relativism; the rest of us call it hypocrisy.

There is also a Darwinian component to this. Scientists have measured, for example, how male fertility varies with distance from one's habitual partner. And guess what? According to a report in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, a man's sperm count doubles when he spends a lot of time on the road - up from 389 million sperm per ejaculate to 712 million. Which, I am sure you will agree, is a lot of extra sperm.

I suggest that it is the coming together (if you will forgive the expression) of these factors that creates such an explosive sexual cocktail within the security-controlled perimeter of the Olympic village. Not that this is a bad thing. I have always regarded sexual promiscuity - for a single person at least - as a basic human right, even if it is no panacea for happiness or, indeed, anything else. Of course, many athletes will abstain, others may even disapprove. Only one thing is certain: they will never again enter a place quite like the Olympic village. Not, at least, until London 2012.

[Murphy3]

Yeah, but does anyone want to sleep with a dirty chinese hostess?

[alby]

Props to the Japanese pitcher for their softball team.. Wasn't it like 350 pitches in 36 hours for a total of 3 complete games in a day and a half? That deserves some praise.

[Flacolaco]

Freaking Latvia beat us out for a BMX medal? wtf?



Beach volleyball final for the men starting now I think...

[Kirobaito]

Dalhausser and Rogers are getting owwwwwwned.

[Flacolaco]

Freaking Americans are just giving to them.

Hey Brazil, congrats on your 10th lousy medal. "good job"

"Now go home and get yer f$%%ing shine box."

[Big Boy Laroux]

geez, dalhausser just had like 6 blocks in a row...

[Flacolaco]

Now this is more like it.

USA baby

[rmacomic]

USA USA USA!!!

[Big Boy Laroux]

and they end it with a dalhausser block. nice!

[Flacolaco]

Somebody buy that big bald man a drink!!

[u2sarajevo]

Cheaters never win.

[Flacolaco]

Originally Posted by u2sarajevo

Cheaters never win.

sike's wife is cheating on him and I let her win all the time.

I mean...the Chinese cheated and they won at gymnastics.

[BGMaverick9]

Nice job by the Men's team. They really clicked in the 3rd when they could've been rattled.

The US Girls could use more Gold from Gymnastics, Boo to Cheating.

[Usually Lurkin]

Originally Posted by Flacolaco

Freaking Latvia beat us out for a BMX medal? wtf?

.

BMX is an olympic sport? wtf???

[jthig32]

The Chinese women have officially swept the table tennis medals, and the all three of the men are alive in the quarterfinals.

Looks like both gold medal matches are going to be China JOS's. *sigh*

[GermanDunk]

LTU leads ESP by 4. hahaha

[alby]

In other news, Bolt has another world record in addition to another gold medal. The 400m relay.

Bolt > Phelps

[Dirkenstien]

Originally Posted by alby

In other news, Bolt has another world record in addition to another gold medal. The 400m relay.

Bolt > Phelps

I don't know about that, but I agree Bolt is stealing some of Phelps' thunder

[alby]

Have him run the 400 and the 110 hurdles too lol

[Flacolaco]

Originally Posted by alby

Bolt > Phelps

Phelps set a world record in his first 5 races, didn't he?

Bolt doesn't have that many medals or records.

[alby]

I think when Bolt jogs around the track for his victory lap, he's still faster than me =P

[alby]

Originally Posted by Flacolaco

Phelps set a world record in his first 5 races, didn't he?

Bolt doesn't have that many medals or records.

The number of medals isn't my basis for comparing the two. The two are definitely out of this world, I just respect Bolt so much more. Especially since he's only 21 and has been running the 100 for less than a year.

[Flacolaco]

I respect Phelps so much more because he's not a flash in the pan.

If Bolt can do it again in 4 years, and then 4 years after that like Phelps will, then we can talk.

[jthig32]

When Bolt breaks a world record in a different style of running, talk to me.

Until that happens, please don't even compare the two.

[alby]

The previous Olympic record was 7 golds in swimming competition, so it wasn't unheard of. Plus, Phelps did the same 8 events in Athens and he got 6 golds so I didn't understand the hoopla over how many swims he had to do this year--he did it already 4 years ago..

This is the same with Bolt, when only one previous time has there been a sprinter who won golds in both the 100 and 200. But, just like Phelps, Bolt was the only one to set the world records while doing so. The scary thing is that according to track and field experts, the 400m should be his best event. If Bolt somehow holds the world records in the 100, 200, and 400, he would regarded as a GOAT in my book.

[Fidel]

Originally Posted by jthig32

The Chinese women have officially swept the table tennis medals, and the all three of the men are alive in the quarterfinals.

Looks like both gold medal matches are going to be China JOS's. *sigh*

I´m Savovic shocked.

[GermanDunk]

Pretty crappy results for Germany and Russia. 15 or so gold medals is not enough.

But also pretty good success in horse doping. Horse doping... !!!

[Underdog]

Originally Posted by GermanDunk

But also pretty good success in horse doping. Horse doping... !!!

Well, that would explain the contents of his posts...

[NXperience]

Originally Posted by GermanDunk

Pretty crappy results for Germany and Russia. 15 or so gold medals is not enough.

But also pretty good success in horse doping. Horse doping... !!!

Well we got more medals then 00 or 04 (in both events 13 gold medals) so I think thats good. We just don't have any good track & field athletes =/

[GermanDunk]

Originally Posted by NXperience

Well we got more medals then 00 or 04 (in both events 13 gold medals) so I think thats good. We just don't have any good track & field athletes ....

... any more.

They maybe got Baumann´s teeth-paste on the horse.

Just a theory...

[fluid.forty.one]

Originally Posted by alby

The previous Olympic record was 7 golds in swimming competition, so it wasn't unheard of. Plus, Phelps did the same 8 events in Athens and he got 6 golds so I didn't understand the hoopla over how many swims he had to do this year--he did it already 4 years ago..

This is the same with Bolt, when only one previous time has there been a sprinter who won golds in both the 100 and 200. But, just like Phelps, Bolt was the only one to set the world records while doing so. The scary thing is that according to track and field experts, the 400m should be his best event. If Bolt somehow holds the world records in the 100, 200, and 400, he would regarded as a GOAT in my book.

So since Phelps did something amazing 4 years ago, it should be appreciated less when he does it again (in an even bigger fashion)?

Phelps > Bolt

[ty]

I didn't see Phelps celebrating before his victory.

Bolt > Phelps. =D

[fluid.forty.one]

what do you want him to do... splash up and down?