2012 Summer Olympics

[SLM]

Double amputee Pistorius makes Olympic history



South Africa's Oscar Pistorius made history on Saturday when he became the first double amputee to compete in an athletics event at the Olympics.
The 25-year-old qualified for the semi-finals of the 400 metres by running a season's best of 45.44 seconds in finishing second.
Pistorius, who had both legs amputated below the knee before he was aged one, because of a congenital condition, runs on carbon fibre blades.
He is also due to run in the 4x400m relay at the Games.

Double amputee Pistorius makes Olympic history - Yahoo! News Canada


Wow. What an amazing accomplishment!!!!!

 

[Kreskin]

Pretty amazing.

 

[gopher]

Canada's record is 0-22-4 against the US in last 26 games.

Yeah, but I think you guys have a little more success against us in winter Olympics.

 

[Kreskin]

Yeah, but I think you guys have a little more success against us in winter Olympics.

Christine Sinclair will need to have the game of her life. She is capable but I'm sure the US has a plan to defend her.

She was the captain of Portland when they won the national championship.

It looks like the game is Monday.

 

[gopher]

^ she learned from one of the greatest coaches (and, more importantly, one of the greatest human beings ever) Clive Charles

 

[Kreskin]

^ she learned from one of the greatest coaches (and, more importantly, one of the greatest human beings ever) Clive Charles

Yes, she gives him credit for everything she has accomplished.

 

[talloola]

^ she learned from one of the greatest coaches (and, more importantly, one of the greatest human beings ever) Clive Charles

Yes, I watched an interview with her yesterday, she talked about him a lot, he was very important in her
life as a player, but more so as a person.

 

[Mowich]

London 2012: Olympic gold doesn’t define Canada: Kelly
By Cathal Kelly Columnist

LONDON - And now I suppose we’re relieved? Why?

Rosie MacLennan’s surprise gold in the trampoline on Saturday let Canada off the reputational hook. Speaking with all deference to her achievement, we might wonder why the rest of us hung ourselves up there in the first place.

We do this to ourselves every fourth summer, sitting on the couch, twisted up in knots, waiting for some poor 23-year-old to give us back our international relevance.

Contrast MacLennan’s ecstasy on Saturday with the agony of triathlete and medal hopeful Paula Findlay. After coming up lame, but still finishing her race, Findlay felt compelled to repeatedly apologize for her performance.

Paula Findlay does not owe Canada a result. She owes it her efforts. She gave something rather more than that out on the streets of London. Perhaps you also cringed when she was saying sorry through the tears.

Call this Own The Podium’s inevitable dark side — the feeling that the failure to win multiple golds is some sort of collective failure.

Own The Podium is a great idea, but only as long as it represents a hoped-for destination, rather than a programmatic demand that we win a bunch of things — or else.

Nobody needs to win anything for Canada. Canada’s fine on its own.

Separate out the countries that need to win here from those who’d only like to, and you have a pretty good global map of places you’d like to live, and the ones you’d only visit.

There are a few ways to guarantee winners: cultivate a strange sporting specialty, produce an enormous population or grind people to dust. That third option works best.

North Korea has four golds in London. To a man and woman, each winner has stood up in front of a microphone, rubbishing their own efforts and giving all praises to the family of hopped-up little weirdos who’ve steered that ship of state onto the rocks. You wonder how many North Koreans don’t eat so that one gold medallist can.

Vladimir Putin decided that Russia would become good at his obsession, judo, and suddenly they are. This comes several decades after his ideological predecessors declared that martial art a foreign “bourgeois” preoccupation, and killed one of the men who introduced it to the country.

At great public expense, Putin rewired the program and hired the finest coach in the world to turn Russia’s hinterlands into a vast judo hothouse.

How much are they paying that coach?

“A fortune,” one Russian journalist (and unhappy taxpayer) here spat. “He’s not going to live in the frigging Caucasus for peanuts.”

Russia spent $186 million (U.S.) on the Vancouver Games, a great deal of it siphoned off by bureaucratic crooks. They came away with three gold medals. The average wage of a Russian worker is less than $9,000 per annum.

Then there’s the increasingly infamous Chinese way — the athletic gulag.

The global backlash over the case of gold-medal diver Wu Minxia, who was removed from her family at 6 and shielded from all bad news, including the death of her grandparents, hasn’t prompted any soul searching at the highest levels of her country.

The Chinese government is sending official messages of congratulations only to gold medallists. Silver and bronze don’t merit any sort of pat on the back from the teetering fossils on the Central Committee.

China has about two dozen gold medals here. Luxembourg has one in its entire history. Where would you rather spend your declining years?

All this to say that while gold medals are wonderful, they are one of life’s little extras. They are a second helping of patriotic dessert. The moment we begin to treat them as a vital necessity is the day after we stop holding elections.

It’s right to take pride in Rosie MacLennan’s big moment — and one might hope, of every other athlete here competing for us with class. But did you think less of Findlay after she finished last? Odds are you thought more. An Olympic hero needn’t be standing on a podium.

If Olympic success is about collective choices, we’ve got it pretty much right — spending just enough to have a variety of muscular programs, but not so much that the real work of governance is sublimated to a once-every-second-year national sugar rush.

I’d rather have one more MRI machine, one more spot in assisted living, one less fellow citizen suffering, than a dump truck full of gold medals.

We should enjoy the success of our athletes, but should not bind ourselves up in it. It isn’t fair to them.

It also belittles the true greatness of our country, which is that we’ve done so well in building our civil society, we don’t need Olympic success in order to prove anything to anyone.

London 2012: Olympic gold doesn't define canada kelly

Hold your head high, Paula........we are proud of you for the courage you showed in finishing your race. You are a Champion and Canada is proud of you.

GO, CANADA, GO! :canada:

 

[Blackleaf]

Double amputee Pistorius makes Olympic history



South Africa's Oscar Pistorius made history on Saturday when he became the first double amputee to compete in an athletics event at the Olympics.
The 25-year-old qualified for the semi-finals of the 400 metres by running a season's best of 45.44 seconds in finishing second.
Pistorius, who had both legs amputated below the knee before he was aged one, because of a congenital condition, runs on carbon fibre blades.
He is also due to run in the 4x400m relay at the Games.

Double amputee Pistorius makes Olympic history - Yahoo! News Canada


Wow. What an amazing accomplishment!!!!!

He shouldn't be competing in the Olympics. He should be in the Paralympics.

Great Britain: 16 golds, 10 silvers and 10 bronzes so far, 36 medals in total, easily in third place in the medals table (but with more medals on a per capita basis than China and the US), and only halfway through London 2012. Fantastic stuff.

GB won SIX gold medals yesterday, making it our most successful day in the Olympics ever. Three of those medals came in the athletics, making it the most successful day for Great Britain in Olympic athletics since the 1908 London Games.

GOLD!! Jessica Ennis celebrates winning the heptathlon in the Olympic Stadium last night during the most successful day for British athletics since the 1908 London Olympics

GOLD!! After that, Greg Rutherford wins Britain's first Olympic long jump medal since the 1964 Tokyo Olympics

GOLD!! Then, on one of the most successful days ever for Britain in the Olympics, Mo Farah becomes the first Briton to win the 10,000 metres

BBC sports pundits Michael Johnson, Denise Lewis and Colin Jackson go wild with celebration as Mo crosses the finishing line

 

[Mowich]

He shouldn't be competing in the Olympics. He should be in the Paralympics.

He fought his battle to be included in the Olympics and won. He has every right to compete with the best.

Great Britain: 16 golds, 10 silvers and 9 bronzes so far, 35 medals in total, easily in third place in the medals table, and only halfway through London 2012. Fantastic stuff.

Good on GB........it is always nice to see the host country do well. Britain has some wonderful athletes..........even the ones that don't medal are worthy of praise.

 

[Blackleaf]

He fought his battle to be included in the Olympics and won. He has every right to compete with the best.

He should be in the Paralympics, not the Olympics. What's the point in having Paralympics for disabled athletes when disabled athletes are able to compete in the Olympics? Pistorious should have no right being in the Olympics.

The 2012 London Olympics are shaping up to be among the best Olympic games of all time, the chief of the US team has said.

She has praised, amongst other things, the excellent venues and the fantastic and super-noisy atmosphere in venues such as the Velodrome (in which the British cyclists are so fast and so dominant the other teams needn't have bothered turning up) and the Olympic Stadium.

Her feelings were apparently shared by the Association of Summer Olympic International Federations (ASOIF) who, apparently, can be very hard to please.

London 2012 'Shaping Up To Be Among The Best Olympics Of All Time' Says Team US Head

 

[SLM]

He should be in the Paralympics, not the Olympics. What's the point in having Paralympics for disabled athletes when disabled athletes are able to compete in the Olympics? Pistorious should have no right being in the Olympics.

If an individual athlete is able to participate in spite of a disability then why the hell shouldn't he be allowed to? They aren't altering anything about the competition to accommodate him. To disallow him simply because he has a disability is discriminatory.

 

[#juan]

If an individual athlete is able to participate in spite of a disability then why the hell shouldn't he be allowed to? They aren't altering anything about the competition to accommodate him. To disallow him simply because he has a disability is discriminatory.

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Initially, I thought that he shouldn't be allowed because I thought there might be motors and things in these devices
that would give somebody an advantage. On a second look, I see that the devices are completely muscle powered
and while they do allow someone with a disability to compete in running, They don't help in other sports. Any disabled
athlete would require a lot of training to use these things.

 

[Liberalman]

Ten medals for Canada and the goal is 12 set by our beloved Prime Minister Stephen Harper for London Olympics 2012

 

[Kreskin]

Pistorius finished 8th in his semi final heat and it was apparent that he gained no advantage by running on blades.

Seems there is some mental gamesmanship going on.

Canada's Coach Says USA Uses 'Illegal' Tactics | - 2012 Olympics | Field sports

 

[gopher]

Yes, I watched an interview with her yesterday, she talked about him a lot, he was very important in her
life as a player, but more so as a person.

Luckily I remember him as a player in EPL and his days as a coach. He was beloved in both capacities for being a wonderful team mate, teacher, and more importantly, for being a wonderful person. As a former athlete/coach myself, there are a great many people in sports that I have admired. Coach Clive Charles ranks among the very top in my list of favorites.

By the way, do you have a link for that interview? If not, I'll check with youtube later on .....

----------------------------


Williams sisters win USA Gold!


BBC Sport - Serena & Venus Williams win third Olympics tennis doubles gold

 

[Cabbagesandking]

If an individual athlete is able to participate in spite of a disability then why the hell shouldn't he be allowed to? They aren't altering anything about the competition to accommodate him. To disallow him simply because he has a disability is discriminatory.

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My problem with this is that I have seen nothing anywhere that assesses the effect of those prosthetics. Do they enhance performance?

If they do, then he should not be allowed to compete. Competition should be restricted to what would be natural ability. Otherwise, why not steroids?

Has Murray finally come of age and put aside the mental lapses that have plagued him? He beat Federer rather easily in straight sets.Apparently the first time Federer has lost to a currently active player in straight sets.

 

[Kreskin]

Luckily I remember him as a player in EPL and his days as a coach. He was beloved in both capacities for being a wonderful team mate, teacher, and more importantly, for being a wonderful person. As a former athlete/coach myself, there are a great many people in sports that I have admired. Coach Clive Charles ranks among the very top in my list of favorites.

By the way, do you have a link for that interview? If not, I'll check with youtube later on .....

----------------------------


Williams sisters win USA Gold!


BBC Sport - Serena & Venus Williams win third Olympics tennis doubles gold

Here's the youtube

The Difference Makers with Rick Hansen - Christine Sinclair - YouTube

Good article at CNN. Americans miss out on the best of the Games - CNN.com

I couldn't agree more. NBC is living in the 70's, when no one knew any better. The same old edited-to-death flagwaving production is shallow, predictable and yesterday's news. I flipped to NBC a couple times and quickly moved on.

 

[gore0bsessed]

Well that was a crazy game between Canada and the U.S.. Terrible calls probably gave U.S the game.

Sinclair had a hattrick , does anyone else do anything on this team? LOL. 1-woman team really.

 

[EagleSmack]

Well that was a crazy game between Canada and the U.S.. Terrible calls probably gave U.S the game.

Sinclair had a hattrick , does anyone else do anything on this team? LOL. 1-woman team really.

Ahhhh hah!


Have some sour grapes Gore!