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August 2008
‘All right. 1-0. That’s good’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Athens — Given the seven months of delirium that led up to the opening kickoff, maybe it’s not surprising that perspective was already obliterated Saturday.
A quarterback throws for 275 yards and two touchdowns. Then he laments his overthrows and underthrows. A defense blanks an opponent for most of three quarters. Then some complain about missed assignments.
A team leads 10-0 and 24-0 and 38-0 and snuffs the drama out of the game so early and so emphatically that the only thing left to wonder is how Uga VII will handle being center kennel. (Answer: About like you would expect: He fell asleep.)
One game. One win. Thirteen Saturdays of nitpicking left?
“It has been hard,” Georgia center Chris Davis said Saturday when asked about handling expectations. “My family is diehard Georgia fans. Every time I go home Sunday night for dinner it’s always like, ‘You better not disappoint us.’ I’m like, ‘Gee, thanks guys.’ ” And pass the potatoes.
Seven months after drilling Hawaii in the Sugar Bowl to close last season and two weeks after this bandwagon jumped the rails when the Associated Press dubbed thee, “No. 1,” the Bulldogs opened the season with a 45-21 win over Georgia Southern. At least, I think they won. Postgame analysis would have you believe some wonderfully choreographed debut mutated into a tragic opera.
Mark Richt began his postgame comments simply: “All right. 1-0. That’s good.”
Then he broke into “La Traviata.” Foolish penalties. Drops. Overthrows. Missed assignments. Sloppiness. And my personal favorite, “The first punt snap was shaky.” I think later in Act III, somebody gets stabbed in a duel and survives, only to have his love interest contract an awful disease and die in his arms.
Is this what it’s going to be like all season?
“As coaches, when things don’t go the way we want, we get bent out of shape,” Richt said. “But it’s good to get the victory.”
This was game one. Teams are not supposed to be perfect yet. The idea is to get better as the year unfolds. The idea is to get better after dispatching a 1-AA opponent when you play Arizona State and Alabama and Tennessee.
You know what would have been a problem Saturday? If the Bulldogs had come out against Georgia Southern and not led 10-0 and 24-0 and 38-0.
To struggle against an inferior team would suggest players, like fans and media, had lost focus. To open the season with first-half turnovers and costly penalties would throw significant doubt on what this team can achieve.
Instead, Georgia did just the opposite.
Yes, it got sloppy in the second half. But heat and humidity and the lack of any semblance of a challenge by the opponent will do that.
“We know we’re good. Everybody knows we’re good,” said defensive tackle Corvey Irvin. “It’s just about going out and showing it every week. Coach Richt has been real big about reminding us to not buy into the hype.”
The Bulldogs ended last season as the No. 2-ranked team in the nation. They ran onto the field as a No. 1-ranked team for the first time since 1982 (before losing to Penn State in the Sugar Bowl).
Did it feel different playing a game as No 1? Of course. It had to.
“I could definitely tell the atmosphere was different,” Davis said. “The fans were a little more riled up.”
Said Stafford, “It was loud when they called out, ‘We’re No. 1.’ That was kind of cool. But other than that, it feels just like another season. You’ve got to grind. It’s a long year in the SEC.”
The Dogs won the national title 28 years ago. They started that season ranked only 16th. But Herschel Walker ran over Bill Bates at Tennessee and things just kept building. Lindsay Scott ran over logic in Jacksonville. Notre Dame was dropped in the Sugar Bowl.
When a team starts low and climbs, it avoids some of the pitfalls of expectations. Start the season No. 1, and it’s a little different. People look for flaws.
Here’s a thought: When a team leads 38-0 in the third quarter, it’s not worth the analysis yet.
Permalink | Comments (125) | Post your comment | Categories: UGA/SEC
Time for predictions: UGA crushes GSU
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Beijing — Sorry. Force of habit. Let’s try this again.
All-Knowing Central — According to my Chairman Mao watch, which cost only $7 and is still keeping time just as well as my $7 Rolex, which I was told by a nice man who seemed in a big hurry that it was a totally real before he also offered me a genuine Chinese gymnastics birth certificate — it’s that time again.
Ni hao. I am back. I’m just not, like, am.
You spend three weeks in a country with an upside clock and it does things to you. Woke up at 2 a.m. again the other day and made everybody breakfast. Completely threw off the dog’s begging schedule.
This is the 15th anniversary of Weekend Predictions. We began this venture in 1993, or not long after Johnny Majors was released from the hospital for bypass surgery and soon realized that one of his doctors must have forgotten his scalpel because something was protruding from between the coach’s shoulder blades and, well, Phil Fulmer said it wasn’t his. (An early-season kiss for the PumpkinNation.)
By now, you should be familiar with how it works. Every week, we give you the winners. It’s just your job to find them.
The weekly tip sheet is sometimes sprinkled with “losses.” But these “losses” merely are devices to throw off competing investment firms. You should be able to easily navigate through these “losses” with the decoder booklet that you received in the mail several weeks ago. If you lost the booklet, I’m sorry. My dog ate my last one with the last breakfast wrap.
Georgia opens Saturday against Georgia Southern. There is no official line on the game. That’s either because Georgia Southern is a I-AA team or possibly because oddsmakers have been scared off by so many Bulldogs fans acting like the deranged blackjack player who keeps saying, “Hit me. Hit me! HIT ME!” even after the dealer says, “Sir. You’ve got 97 showing.”
We have been led to believe that by the time this season is over, Georgia will be the first team to go 14-0 and win the national championship while having a quarterback and running back share the Heisman Trophy and a coach win the Nobel. And then, we conquer Spain.
I’m setting the line at 23. That’s the average margin of victory in Georgia’s three previous victories over Southern. For the record, this will be the last bit of research from me for at least seven weeks.
That’s it. Mao’s running slow, I’m running long. Dogs cover 23.
Early-season Six-Pack (I drank one)
• Clemson vs. Alabama: Just wondering what feels worse in Tuscaloosa: Nick Saban taking you to Shreveport in his first season, or going into the second knowing Tommy Bowden is so much closer to winning a conference title than you are? Tigers cover 41/2.
• Western Illinois at Arkansas: In honor of Bobby Petrino’s first game, the first through 5,000 fans will receive traded souls, although there’s a chance they may expire in the third quarter. Western Illinois has a really cool nickname: The Leathernecks. Unfortunately, I don’t see George Clooney anywhere, just Beelzebub. No official line. Let’s say Porkbellies cover 17.
• Tennessee at UCLA: Fulmer hasn’t coached a team to a BCS bowl since 1999, but here’s the good news: The Vols get to play in the Rose Bowl Monday. It’ll almost be like they’re a factor, except not. Rick Neuheisel and Norm Chow will make things interesting in L.A. Feeling frisky. Vols win but give me the Bruins and 7 1/2.
• Hawaii at Florida: Former Hawaii coach June Jones, ironically a master of the statistically inflated system quarterback, last year referred to Tim Tebow as a system quarterback. Jones is now at SMU — just in case his players want to know where to send the medical bills. Gators cover 35.
• La-Monroe at Ala-Auburn: Just about the time everybody had run out of Saban jokes, Louisiana-Monroe beat Alabama last year. You’d think Auburn would just let them walk in for a touchdown to open the game as a thank you. Won’t matter in the end, anyway. Tigers cover 26.
Etc.
Next week: Matt Ryan screams for help and NFL picks.
Lock of the week: Schlage
Permalink | Comments (84) | Post your comment | Categories: Tech/ACC, UGA/SEC
Magic moment for Howard
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Beijing — Sometimes you can be 22 years old and feel like a little kid. Somebody drapes a gold medal around your neck and you’re not quite sure what to do first. So you look at it. Then you kiss it. Then you bite it. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?
“I didn’t want to mess it up too much,” Dwight Howard said. “I just wanted to make sure it was real.”
He stood with a gold medal around his neck, thinking back 16 years. A Wheaties box with the original Dream Team on the cover was in his room. He remembers watching the Olympics at the age of six, and wanting to be a sprinter (genetics took care of that one). He remembers Atlanta in 1996, when his sister beat him to the Games — she danced in the Opening Ceremonies.
Dwight Howard had his turn in Beijing. No matter what happens the rest of his career, he can say he started at center for an Olympic gold medal-winning basketball team.
With any luck, he will be able to say it happened twice. Or three times. Or more.
“I’ve committed to this team until I can’t walk no more,” Howard said.
The U.S. men’s basketball team had just beaten Spain, 118-107, in the gold medal game on the final day of the Olympics. Howard, at 22, was the youngest member of the team. This surpassed anything he experienced as a star at Southwest Atlanta Christian Academy or in the NBA with the Orlando Magic.
“I’m going to wear this for a week. Maybe two weeks. Maybe the whole year. Actually, I’m not taking it off,” said Howard, who also had an American flag draped around his neck. “I’m just gonna keep wearing it, until we have to play a game next season. In fact, I might keep it on under my jersey. I want to have it with me every day to know what it feels like to be a champion.”
Several rows up from the floor in section 103 of the Olympic Basketball Gymnasium, Sheryl Howard waited for her son to return from the locker room for the medal ceremony. She wore a No. 11 USA jersey with “Howard” on the back. She clutched three flags: one large, two small. Her husband, Dwight Sr., had walked down the aisle to get in a better position to take pictures of Dwight II on the podium
“This is the ultimate,” she said. “It’s for the world, so this has to be the ultimate goal. His goal is to win a championship for [an NBA] team. But to play for the world and win a gold, it’s unbelievable.”
She remembered getting a phone call when Dwight was selected for the Olympic team. “He said it was a blessing to make the team and to play for the USA,” she said. “Those were his exact words.”
Howard was limited to eight points and five rebounds in 17 minutes in the final. The U.S. was drawn into a running game by Spain, prompting coach Mike Krzyzewski to go with a smaller, quicker lineup. But the Americans had a different leader almost every game. They had six different leading scorers (including a tie once between Kobe Bryant and Chris Bosh) in eight games. Dwayne Wade led the U.S. with 27 points in the finale.
Howard’s turn came in the final preliminary round game against Germany, when he poured in 22 points and 10 rebounds. A theme coming out this tournament was how a group of 12 NBA superstars managed to put egos aside for a common goal, which wasn’t the case in 2004 in Athens. USA basketball named a national select team three years ago, and picked the Olympians from that group. The camps the team held over those three years clearly paid off.
Asked if this will change the image of NBA players, Howard said, “I hope so. Everybody saw how we can come together.”
He soaked it in all week. He visited the athletes village, even though the team stayed in a five-star hotel. He also met former Olympic gymnast Dominic Dawes, his lifelong crush. Mother and son have slightly different versions of the meeting.
Dwight: “That was fun.”
Mom: “I heard he met her and fell to the floor.”
Either way, dreams achieved.
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Beijing Games come up short on soul
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Beijing — The first time Charles Lee came to China in 1979, there wasn’t a great preoccupation with impressing people. Beijing hadn’t been blanketed with flower pots. Teenage girls didn’t run 50 feet through rain storms to hand you an umbrella. Natives didn’t stop white people in the middle of Tiananmen Square, merely to take their picture and ask, “What do you think of our country?”
“There was one road into town,” said Lee, a former Los Angeles judge who was instrumental in China’s inclusion in the 1984 Olympics and now a USOC official. “I remember the big activity at night was to go see the magic show. Then during the daytime, we went on a tour of the light-bulb factor. That was it.”
It’s more than that now. China was intent on impressing world in these Olympics. It went beyond the booming infrastructure, the cannonball off the diving board into capitalism and even the Beijing Hooters (which fairly is in line with a slogan during Mao’s Cultural Revolution: “Unleash the fury of women as a mighty force for revolution!”)
In short, the people of China really wanted you to like them. Unfortunately, the grading for what we saw over 17 days in Beijing can’t end there.
These Olympics gave us some wonderful competition and two athletes for the ages: U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps, who won a record eight gold medals and set seven world records, and Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, who set records in the 100, 200 and as part of the 4x100 relay team.
People were gracious. Events ran smoothly. Buses ran on time. Nobody keeled over from the smog (although several came close).
But something significant was missing: atmosphere. This won’t go down as the greatest Olympics ever. They could go down as the most antiseptic.
Atlanta’s Olympics were criticized on many fronts for transportation and technical breakdowns. But at least Atlanta had a pulse. Beijing seemed closer to a perfectly dressed mannequin.
Chinese officials were determined not to allow its government’s Bar Mitzvah to become a showcase for protesters. That’s fine, to a point. But they went overboard.
There were times it seemed the Beijing Olympics weren’t taking place in a city but rather a dollhouse, with a big hand coming down to move the little pieces around. Police and security officials cleared streets of perceived undesirables. Demonstrations in Tiananmen Square were quickly smothered, like a People’s Army boot on an ant hill.
China promised the IOC openness. Instead, we got Hollywood back lots with phony housing fronts. The government set up an application process for human-rights activists. They designated three protest zones. But none of the applications were accepted. Several applicants were arrested. One woman, Zhang Wei, wanted to protest her home being leveled for Olympic construction. She received a month in prison for “disturbing social order.”
The Olympics are supposed to be a celebration, not a 24/7 ROTC march.
There were many several days when I walked through the “Olympic Green” toward competition venues. To my left were fountains and pools, wonderfully landscaped. But they were fenced off. Security guards were lined up like pawns on a chessboard. People took pictures through wire fencing.
It wrecked the scene. It set the tone. These were the look-but-don’t-touch Olympics.
USOC chairman Peter Ueberroth played the role of diplomat. “If you accept an invitation to somebody’s house and you start saying I don’t like the furniture, I don’t like this house, I don’t like the food — then you shouldn’t go. It’s not our responsibility [to speak out]. Politicians can make a statement.”
The IOC can make the statement. Don’t award the Games to any country with a failing record in human rights.
The aftermath of elaborate Opening Ceremonies spoke volumes. There were stories of 51-hour rehearsals where participants were allowed only two bathroom breaks and two meals. Several collapsed from exhaustion or heatstroke. Some performers wore diapers because they couldn’t leave the field for six hours.
Fifteen minutes before the show, a 7-year-old girl was replaced by a 9-year-old girl to lip-synch, “Ode to the Motherland.” Zhang Yimou didn’t believe the 7-year-old was cute enough. That should do wonders for her self-esteem.
In an interview with Chinese journalists, Zhang said only North Korea could’ve put on a better show (“They are uniform beyond belief!”)
Zhang added: “I have conducted operas in the West. It was so troublesome. They only work four and a half days each week. Everyday there are two coffee breaks and no overtime work at all. There cannot be any discomfort because of human rights.”
Darn those human rights.
They can wreck any show.
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Hope Solo, U.S. women look for redemption
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Beijing — It was clear by the time Pia Sundhage took over as head coach of the U.S. women’s soccer program that the team had come a long way since its Olympic debut in Atlanta.
They had devolved from smiles and gold medals and inspiring little girls to dropkick their Easy-Bake Ovens to a relatively miserable, sniping existence that led to teammates ostracizing their goalie. Such transitions from joy to drama queens tend to be reserved for instant-messaging 13-year-olds.
“I will say this,” said Sundhage, a former star soccer player and coach in her native Sweden. “It would have been more difficult for me to come in and make changes if everything was fine and the team had won the World Cup. But I think they were ready for a new approach.”
So she sang.
Against the backdrop of a stunning U.S. exit from the World Cup - goalie Hope Solo verbally backhanded her coach in an interview after being benched and created perhaps the greatest female athletic drama since a kneecapped figure skater - Sundhage sang to her players in the first team meeting.
She chose Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” to get across a message.
“I started laughing,” defender Kate Markgraf said.
Hey, that’s a start.
The U.S. women have reached the championship game for the fourth straight Olympics. Their résumé includes two golds, one silver and a highly improbable return to today’s final against Brazil.
The roster is devoid of familiar names (Mia Hamm, Brandi Chastain, Julie Foudy). The team’s best player, Abby Wambach, suffered a broken leg in an exhibition against Brazil last month. Solo, back as the starting goalie, wasn’t even sure she wanted to play soccer again — and certainly didn’t know if anybody wanted her back. But they’re here.
The team allowed a goal 63 seconds into the Olympics and lost to Norway 2-0. But four straight wins have followed and the Americans ironically now face the team Solo never got a chance to play in the World Cup last year. Then-coach Greg Ryan started goalie Briana Scurry (a member of three previous Olympic teams) over Solo (who had been the starter and was coming off three straight shutouts), leading to so much wreckage.
Brazil won 4-0. Solo went ballistic. If she had merely ripped Ryan after the game, few would’ve had a problem. Instead, a 28-second TV interview included shots at Scurry, notably: “I would’ve made those saves,” and, “It doesn’t matter what somebody did in an Olympic gold-medal game three years ago.”
Ryan’s blunder suddenly moved to the background. Solo basically was blackballed. She was told not to come around for team meals or the bronze-medal game. She wasn’t on the team flight from Shanghai.
Ryan was out of a job three months later, but Solo was still deeply depressed. Shortly before the Games, her father died suddenly of heart failure. A close friend was killed in a car accident. Soccer was her refuge until Ryan’s benching.
“I didn’t think I was coming back,” she said following practice Wednesday. “I didn’t think I’d be here. That’s where I find my pleasure today.”
She eventually apologized. Teammates eventually accepted her. Sundhage, the needed fresh voice from the outside, suggested everybody move forward.
“If we didn’t forgive her,” Heather O’Reilly said, “we would be doing the same amount of injustice that some people think she did to us.”
Solo credited Sundhage for healing wounds. “We needed that outside source to come in and shake things up a little bit and give us a new mind-set about everything.
There’s no time to dwell on the past. She came in with this aura of confidence.”
Asked what she had learned since that evening 11 months ago, Solo said, “With every hardship, you learn a lot. I’ve learned a lot about my closest friends and family members and how you really need them in toughest times. I learned a lot about myself, my teammates, about what to say and what not to say, about emotions. I feel better and stronger and more equipped to handle anything in my life.”
Today’s game has several storylines, she said. What’s hers?
“Whether it’s a player or a team, everybody likes a redemption story,” she said.
Permalink | Comments (18) | Post your comment | Categories: Beijing Olympics
Taormina looks to overcome obstacles in pentathlon
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Beijing - It was the founder of the Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who created the first modern pentathlon, five events to mimic the skills of 19th century cavalry soldiers.
If nothing else, the sport’s Olympic debut in 1912 made for amusing history. George S. Patton, then a mere lieutenant, completely blew his medal chances when he finished 21st in the pistol competition after missing the target. But he wasn’t a bad swimmer.
So if Sheila Taormina does a face plant in the modern pentathlon, at least she has good company. Also, she’s not a bad swimmer. She competed at Georgia, won a gold medal in Atlanta in 1996. She made the next two Olympic teams as a triathlete. Even if she overshoots the target or not this week, she will make history as the first woman Olympian to compete in three sports. (Three men did it in the early 1900s, but in each case one of their events was tug-of-war. Not so soldier-like.)
Five events in one day - shooting, fencing, swimming, horse jumping, running - would test anybody’s resolve. But Taormina has endured worse. The death of a sister in a car accident. Clinical depression. Economic hardship. Stalking. All of the pressures associated with trying to become proficient in a five-event sport, knowing she had never ridden horse, shot a gun or held a sword in her life.
It probably speaks to the level of modern pentathlon in the U.S. that Taormina can make the Olympic team. (“We have athletes who are doing this for three years. I am used to athletes being in modern pentathlon for 10 years,” said U.S. coach Janusz Peciak.) But it doesn’t diminish the undertaking.
“I have been on the edge to the point that this was not a mentally healthy endeavor,” Taormina admitted. “My family for the first year asked me to not do this. The financial stress because I had to sell my house to do it. The mental stress. I was losing, falling off the horse. It’s tough to take. After you win a gold medal in one sport and you win a world championship in another sport, you find yourself getting humiliated time and time again. You’re broke financially. Nobody really believes you can do it.”
So why do it?
She says she needed a final challenge. She didn’t want to look back with regret for not trying for a third sport in a fourth Olympics. Jack Bauerle, her swim coach at Georgia, said, “There’s something that drives her that doesn’t drive other people.”
But start three new sports and there are going to be problems. The first was the horse. “She was incredibly intimidated,” her riding coach, Michael Cintas, said. “The biggest problem I had was getting her to relax. The horse knows.”
Taormina doesn’t do relax. She tried to retire after the ‘96 Games. She returned home to Livonia, Mich., and put her MBA to work, taking out a small business loan, buying a camper and driving around for public speaking, appearances at corporate events and sports clinics.
Kids asked if she was going back to the Olympics. She always said no.
“I did nothing sports-wise,” she said. “I ate at Taco Bell. I gained weight. I was just driving and eating junk food all the time. After two years of doing that, I entered a local triathlon in Michigan, just to lose weight.”
She laughed.
“It took me 21 years to figure out how to make the Olympic swim team. It took me one year and two months to make the Olympic triathlon team. Part of what I’ve learned is, ‘You’ve got an engine,’ but everybody takes their own path.”
That triathlon? She won the women’s race and finished fifth overall. The race director, Lew Kidder, told her she had Olympic potential. He ended up coaching her. Taormina made the U.S. teams in Sydney and Athens, finishing sixth and 23rd (suffering from leg cramps), respectively.
But she was battling significant issues. For 11 months, starting in the summer of 2002, she was stalked by a man in Livonia. James Conyers had phoned her one day asking for swim tips to improve his triathlon. Taormina told him they could meet in three weeks.
“The next day he left a message saying I would win a gold medal in 2004 and in 2005 I would retire and have his baby,” Taormina said. “I’ve never had a phone call like that. I didn’t know if it was a joke. It just grew from there - Fed Ex packages of roses, plans for our marriage, moving to France.”
She got a personal protection order, which he violated several times. Finally, he was arrested, convicted and sentenced to 40 to 60 months in jail. But after Athens, Taormina suffered from depression. She saw two sports psychologists. One told her she had post-traumatic stress disorder. “I said, ‘No, that’s for people who come back from war.’”
She got itchy again in 2005. She considered cross-country skiing. But it was too cold on the Upper Peninsula, even for a Michigan girl. Then a friend suggested modern pentathlon. When she heard she could be the first three-sport female, she was hooked. Her mother couldn’t talk her out of it. She trained 10 hours a day, six days a week. But she couldn’t attract sponsors and went broke. She sold her house or would’ve defaulted on the mortgage. She got depressed and went on anti-depressants. But she endured and she’s here.
She is 39. Her roommate and teammate, Margaux Isaksen, is 16.
“She’s like my big sister,” Isaksen said.
After this, Taormina says she is done with the Olympics. It’s time to get a real job. “Given what I’ve gone through this year, it will make it easy for me to close the door.”
She’s a long shot for a medal but isn’t conceding anything.
“I have the potential to win,” she said. “I also have the potential to look like a complete fool.”
Not really. Not even if she misses the target.
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Trotter runs despite the pain
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Beijing — The number eight is considered lucky in Chinese culture, so much so that Beijing hoped to create some good karma by opening the Olympics on 8-8-08 at 8:08 p.m. Michael Phelps isn’t arguing. He just won eight gold medals.
But Dee Dee Trotter? She’s probably more into numerology, where eight sometimes is considered the number of destruction.
Phelps just completed his dream Olympics.
Trotter just passed through the alternate universe.
Three weeks before the U.S. trials, her car door sprung back and slammed into her knee. Despite significant knee damage, the former gold medal winner out of Cedar Grove High somehow made the Olympic team any way. Then she arrived in China, only to discover her luggage was still in Atlanta.
At some point, she should’ve taken the hint.
A few minutes before her semifinal race of the 400 Sunday, Trotter was still in a dressing room, as trainers desperately tried to make her knee not feel like someone was taking a jackhammer to it. She finally came out, ran the race and finished in seventh.
Anybody who wanted to demoralize eighth-place finisher Nwal Eljack of Sudan only needed to tell her that she lagged behind someone who’s about to have major knee surgery.
A bone chip will be removed from Trotter’s left knee soon. There’s also a good possibility that doctors will replace a portion of the knee with bone from a cadaver.
Expected length of rehab: nine months. Eight, if she’s lucky.
At least she gets to keep the cool warm-ups. And think of all those air miles.
“I actually feel fortunate that I even made it here,” Trotter said. “If there was any year where I wasn’t going to make the Olympic team, this was it. I could’ve been sitting at home, wrapped and braced.”
She’ll be there soon enough. Sudden recovery aside, she’s not going to run in a relay for the United States.
“I’d love to win a gold medal,” she said, “but I’m not going to be selfish and put the team at risk.”
Trotter was joined in Beijing by her mother. You can’t miss her. She’s the nice lady with the broken ankle. It seems she recently stumbled while walking down the stairs. The whole family needs to go on a cruise.
“We look like two Humpty Dumptys,” Trotter said.
Do they give out gold medals for simply enduring?
Trotter won a gold medal in Athens on the 4x400 relay team. Last year, she upset her teammate, Sanya Richards, the Olympic gold medal favorite, in the World Outdoor Championships. She was a legitimate medal possibility in Beijing until she was in her garage in Knoxville, opened the car door to get out, stuck out her left leg and the door sprung back. An MRI revealed the bone chip. The bone chip led to swelling. The swelling led to a plan.
“We went into NFL mode,” she said. “It was like, ‘OK, we need to get ready to play.’ “
She and doctors planned a six-week schedule of daily intensive treatment to lead up to the track competition. The six-week plan worked for three weeks.
Trotter had surprisingly qualified at the trials with a time of 50.88 — three seconds faster than she had been running a week earlier. The knee didn’t feel great but she was managing.
“It was like putting a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound,” she said.
On Monday, Trotter said she ran a 150-meter sprint in 16.8 seconds, a personal best. The next morning, the knee grew a grapefruit out the side. The past few days have been a struggle. Trotter almost didn’t make it out of the preliminary round Saturday. On Sunday, she almost didn’t make it off the training table.
“Until Tuesday, I thought I was ready to roll,” she said. “Then things started going downhill and I just started falling apart.”
There is good news. The luggage arrived after a few days. Lucky her.
Permalink | Comments (13) | Post your comment | Categories: Beijing Olympics
Greatest Olympian ever? It’s a deep pool
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Beijing — It speaks to an athlete’s dominance when people cease comparing him to others in his era. It speaks to Michael Phelps’ rare dominance that the debate has left the pool. And the century.
Is he better than Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals in Berlin with Adolf Hitler watching?
Has he surpassed Carl Lewis, who equaled Owens’ four golds in Los Angeles, then won five more in the next three Olympics?
Do we reach back to a Soviet gymnast, Larissa Latynina, from the 1950s? A Finnish distance runner, Paavo Nurmi, from the ’20s? Nadia Comaneci, who was so otherworldly in Montreal that gymnastics scoreboards in ‘76 weren’t even equipped to post her perfect 10s, leaving fans perplexed over judges giving her only a “1.0” on floor exercise?
If Michael Phelps isn’t the greatest Olympian of all-time, he is at least in the argument.
If bling is the determining factor, it’s no contest. Phelps swam to his eighth gold medal in as many events Sunday morning in Beijing, breaking the 36-year-old record of Mark Spitz. His leg of the men’s 4x100 medley relay, the butterfly, gave the U.S. the lead. He then stood on the deck, slapping the diving block with his hand to urge on teammate Jason Lezak, who held onto first, as the Americans won in a record time of 3:29.34, ahead of second-place Australia.
Phelps swam in his first Olympics as a 15-year-old in Sydney. Since then, he merely has made everybody else look like a kid. His two-Games resume since: at 16 medals (14 gold), nine individual golds and nine world records.
There is dominance. Then there is mind-numbing.
It’s like watching somebody open a laptop computer during the Stone Age.
“I’m lost for words,” Phelps said. “The whole thing, every race, one after the other, from winning by one one-hundredth of a second to finishing it off with a world record. … It has been nothing but an upwards rollercoaster. It has been nothing but fun.”
These Olympics have been a race for second. FINA executive director Cornel Marculescu summed it up nicely. “The problem is we have an extra-terrestrial,” he said.
We will forever remember Phelps not merely for his medals but how he got there. He swam the 200-meter butterfly in world record time despite being partially blinded most of the race, his goggles filled with water. He won his seventh gold in the 100 butterfly, despite making the turn at 50 meters in seventh place. Serbia’s Milorad Cavic appeared to get to the wall first. But Phelps reached out with one of those long limbs and touched first.
Elite athletes find ways to motivate themselves, even when sheer ability is good enough. Before the 100 butterfly, Phelps’ coach, Bob Bowman, told him of a Cavic quote in which the Serb declared: “It would be good for the sport if he loses. It would be good for him if he loses.” That’s all Phelps needed to hear.
Cavic swam a great race. He’s just not terribly bright. What could be better for a sport than having a superstar? What could be better for Phelps?
“I don’t even know what to feel right now. So many emotions,” he said. “I just want to see my mom.”
That should be good for a soup commercial.
He wanted to change swimming. Done. A friend sent him text messages after the 100 butterfly about seeing the race live — on a JumboTron at a baseball game.
He wanted to change a sport. Instead he changed the argument.
Phelps vs. Spitz? It’s over.
Phelps vs. Owens? Phelps has the numbers. But Owens faced pressures we can’t possible imagine. He won events in two disciples, running and long jump, whereas Phelps only swims.
Phelps vs. Lewis? Phelps surpassed him in gold medals. (Lewis won nine). But Lewis ran and jumped and competed in four Games. Then again, he didn’t take a daily sledgehammer to the record books. Phelps has done that.
Phelps vs. anybody from decades long ago? There are more competing nations today. But isn’t that true in every sport? Do we throw Willie Mays and Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth out of baseball arguments because Barry Bonds faces more and better pitchers?
Nobody has ever dominated his sport like Phelps. But the talent pool is deeper in track than swimming. More athletes from more places.
He is fast — faster than we’ve ever seen and possibly ever will see. But sprints and jumps and long-distance running is so much harder on the body than swimming. Consider: Swimming is used to help rehab runners from injuries, not the other way around.
Greatest Olympian ever? The argument can’t be won. At least not yet.
“I’m sure,” Phelps said, “Bob and I can think of some other goals in the next four years.”
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Olympics track running from drug controversy
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Beijing — It was so much more fun when we could just wag our finger at everybody else.
Ben Johnson shows up at a track meet looking like Lou Ferrigno. Chinese swimmers shatter swim records — and land speed records. East German women suddenly answer to the name, “Wolfgang.”
Us? Not us, we thought. We don’t cheat.
Until syringes started and coded notes started falling out of pockets. Until HGH and THG and EPO became part of the sports lexicon. Until BALCO. Until Marion Jones, C.J. Hunter, Tim Montgomery, Chryste Gaines, Justin Gatlin, Kelli White and even a set of twins, Alvin and Calvin Harrison, who presumably bought in bulk.
Now look at the U.S. Olympic track team. If the field seems devoid of stars, it’s probably because everybody is either retired, jailed, suspended, excommunicated or holding tearful statements on courtroom steps to admit that they were lying all of those times they said they weren’t lying and they will never lie again because they’re really a good person, so help them [fill in name of image consultant].
The Olympics started Friday for U.S. track and field team members. They have two objectives: 1) Win medals; 2) Make sure their blood and urine samples don’t melt the bottom of the test tubes.
“I don’t think you’re going to see anybody on our team having problems with that,” shot-putter Christian Cantwell said. “In the US, with as much as we get tested, you would have to be a [freakin’] idiot to take drugs. I hope the dumb ones are out. I hope the [losers] are out. They’re the ones who are screwing it up for everybody else. I hope every cheater is caught.”
It will take at least one Olympic cycle and several months without a warehouse bust to convince people. But at least some U.S. athletes are trying. Several are members of “Test Me I’m Clean,” a non-profit organization started by 400-meter champion Dee Dee Trotter of Grovetown, Ga. The program educates youths and athletes on the dangers of performance-enhancing drugs.
The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) recently started “Project Believe,” in which athletes voluntarily submit to extra testing.
“Any time someone tests positive in track and field, it’s a major blow,” said decathlete Brian Clay, who is in the program. “It can be during trials, during the Olympics, during Christmas, whenever. It’s even more of a blow to the athletes who are trying to do it the right way. It takes away endorsement opportunities from us. It takes away our ability to move forward. Quite frankly, it sucks.”
Reese Hoffa, the shot-putter from Georgia, said Friday he was tested three times in a span of 10 days after arriving in China. But he’s not complaining. “Any time something happens, the sport gets tarnished,” he said. “When I hear about somebody testing positive, I’m a little saddened by it. When I heard about Marion Jones, I was just happy that she was a sprinter and not a shot-putter.”
Jones can’t possibly comprehend how much damage she did when she lied to two grand juries and the public about steroid use. She was high profile, successful, cute. Kids weren’t the only ones who looked up to her.
“I looked up to her,” said Allyson Felix, the 200-meter sprinter. “It was personally devastating for me to see that it was true. I guess I felt even more responsible to be a role model to younger kids because that was important to me. It would be great if my role model could have been clean and still be my role model.
“I think we all know that our sport has taken another step backward. I think we’re all in agreement that it’s our responsibility to shed some light back on our sport and we can do that with some amazing performances.”
What happened to the image of U.S. track and field team wasn’t the same as everybody else. Track is our centerpiece. Track is Jesse Owens, Bob Mathias and Wilma Rudolph. Jones, Montgomery and Gatlin — they wrecked more than their own lives. They wrecked a sport. They wrecked a legacy. They wrecked the joke.
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No one laughing at USA baskeball now
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Beijing — As catastrophic athletic events go, a team of selfish, passionless, self-absorbed American basketball schleps losing to Puerto Rico should not lead anybody to scream, “I feel shame,” and slink north toward Manitoba.
It certainly didn’t bother Chris Bosh all that much four years ago.
“I was amused,” the former Georgia Tech star said. “I mean, it was a little funny. But I understand how tough it can be.”
Bosh finding humor in the 2004 Just Dreaming Team hardly makes him unpatriotic. If anything, it makes him normal. He realized the absurdity of it all. Amusement trumps indifference seven days a week.
Two words about U.S. basketball in these Olympics: not funny.
They’re actually trying. They actually care. They actually dive on the court and crash the boards and stand during the national anthem with a hand over their heart, as if some sense of national pride has crept into the equation.
Go figure.
The U.S. basketball team is 3-0. Possibly going on 8-0. It might be time for opponents to start asking for autographs again.
It’s not just that the U.S. has beaten up on China by 31, Angola by 21 and Greece by 23 in Thursday’s 92-69 win. China, Angola and Greece are infinitely beat-up-able. A loss to any of the three would have been, well, funny.
But did you watch Thursday? NBA stars played pressure defense. They had 15 steals. In points off turnovers, they outscored Greece 28-4.
There was a play in which Dwyane Wade lunged in the backcourt to save the ball from going out of bounds, then threw it back over his head to Kobe Bryant for two.
There was a play in which LeBron James stole a pass, jetted in, did a reverse slam and then stared at the Greece cheering section. There was passion and effort and direction. This is what it’s supposed to look like.
There was a play in which James missed a free throw that led to an offensive rebound and a three-point play by Wade.
Two years ago, even after Jerry Colangelo flushed the roster and made players actually convince him that they wanted to play for their flag, there still was reason to wonder. The U.S. played Greece in the semifinals of the World Championship, and lost. On Thursday, they actually looked like they were upset about it.
“They were like this from the warm-up,” said the Greece guard, Nikolaos Zisis. “I think they had big motivation to win this game. For them it was a big disappointment to have the win by us, a small country from overseas.”
Mock time appears to be over.
“Embarrassment,” Carmelo Anthony said when asked what he remembers from the Greece game. “We had that game in the back of our minds.”
Anthony is one of only three holdovers from the 2004 team (James and Wade are the others). “Four years ago we had a pretty good team, but we weren’t connected like we’re connected now. Now we have five guys on the floor communicating and playing defense.”
That didn’t happen in Athens?
“No,” he said, and smiled.
Kobe and LeBron and Carmelo are not Magic and Bird and Michael. They don’t have to be.
“We’re not trying to compare ourselves to Barcelona’s team,” said Bosh, who tied for the U.S. lead with 18 points, five rebounds and two steals against Greece. “We can’t compare to them. What we can be is be the best team we can be.”
Since 1992, the U.S. team has gone from dominant to bored to disinterested. That couldn’t continue. Colangelo has told and retold the story about Michael Redd coming straight from a workout to his interview with the executives about playing in Beijing. Redd arrived at Colangelo’s hotel carrying a suit, then asked if he could change in the bathroom.
“I wanted to look right,” Redd said.
Colangelo suspected he had found the right players.
“But you can never really be sure until you start,” he said. “We’ll find out pretty quick.”
They found out. Nobody’s laughing.
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At 29, Atlantan Taylor still has his hurdles to clear
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Beijing — The alarm would go off at 4. The work would start at 5. The alarm used to trigger the athlete’s training day. Now it was talking to an electrician: “Get up. You need the money. You lost your Nike deal. Get up. Now.”
“I did mostly low-voltage stuff,” said Angelo Taylor. “Up and down the ladder. We did the new dorms at Georgia Tech.”
Did they know him? How often would somebody walk by at Tech, a school Taylor once attended, and never realize the guy on the ladder doing the low-voltage work used to be a world-class athlete?
How many times did somebody walk by the parked Honda in a track stadium behind Turner Field in the early afternoon and see a man asleep in the car? A coach would arrive at 2 p.m. and bang on the window so the man would wake up. Another alarm. “Get up. You’re not that fast any more. You’re not that young any more. Do you really want to go back to the Olympics? Get up. Now.”
The alarm went off in Angelo Taylor’s head.
He is up now. Against a backdrop of physical, emotional and legal problems, the two-time gold-medalist from Southwest DeKalb High made his third Olympic team in the 400-meter hurdles.
He is 29 years old. Of the other 25 athletes in the 400, 21 are younger than Taylor.
It wasn’t that long ago when he was the young one — 21 and four years out of high school, he won two gold medals in Sydney. He won the 400 hurdles and ran a prelim for the 4x400 relay team. U.S. track officials named him winner of the Jesse Owens Award as its athlete.
Taylor made the Olympic team again in 2004. But soon after, his career deteriorated and his life went with it. Hurdles, the literal and figurative kind, nearly destroyed him. He had stress fractures in his shins. Doctors suggested surgery but Taylor passed, opting to take a year off.
Other damage was self-inflicted. In 2005, Taylor was arrested for having sex with a minor. He eventually pled guilty in 2006 to contributing to the delinquency of two underage girls and was sentenced to three years probation and fined.
“Sometimes in life you have your ups and downs,” Taylor said. “In my life, I’ve always had to go down that rocky road. But I’ve tried to stay positive.”
At some point, he realized he needed to grow up. He felt he needed to be a better example for his twin sons, Xavier and Isaiah, now 3. He knew he wanted to get back to the Olympics. He met with a coach, former Nigerian sprinter Innocent Egbunike. The two formed a partnership. Taylor became more spiritual. He worked in the morning and trained in the afternoon.
But these things never start out well.
“He was out of shape,” Egbunike said. “To be honest, he would throw up a lot and lie flat on the ground. But when I would say, ‘Let’s stop right here,’ he would say, ‘No, I’m going to continue.’ And he would still be throwing up. He struggled, but he did it. He had a vision.”
Taylor was asked what he considered the low moment. Easy answer.
“It would be [getting up at] 4 in the morning and going to work,” he said. “I was like, ‘I can’t do this.’ But I kept praying, asking the Lord to please just give me another chance. I never thought I would make it this far.”
It took a while. Promoters wouldn’t let him into meets, mostly because he hadn’t been competing. The sport seemed to turn its back on him.
“It embarrassed me at first,” Taylor said.
He left the electricians job in early 2007 to devote more time to track. His times dropped. Remarkably, he finished third in the trials with a time of 48.42 to make the team.
Don’t trust the time? Taylor wears a bracelet that reads, “Test me. I’m clean.” He’s an advocate of cleaning up the sport. Unfortunately, it’s too late to save one of his golds. Antonio Pettigrew, a teammate in the Sydney relay, admitted using EPO and HGH. The IOC has stripped the team.
“I was on the relay team with someone who was dirty,” Taylor said. “That’s just the way it is.”
There are no relay teammates to worry about this time. Taylor made it here on his own. If it doesn’t work out, there’s a ladder and an alarm clock waiting for him.
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Phelps is human after all
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Beijing — After winning his third gold medal and continuing to make the world’s other top swimmers look like Labradors wearing water wings, Michael Phelps was nice enough to share his training secrets with the assembled masses.
“I’m eating plenty of pasta and pizza,” he said. “I’m eating a lot of carbs. And I’m sleeping as much as I can.”
Now, I’m not sure if this was merely a transparent attempt to procure an endorsement deal with Pizza Hut, or if Phelps was just schmoozing the media, which, by the way, really takes only pizza and pasta. But it was comforting to learn he has something in common with the rest of humanity, even if every lap in these Olympics seems to scream otherwise.
Phelps is not just winning. As teammate Aaron Peirsol said, “He’s absolutely destroying everything.”
His first five races have resulted in five gold medals and five world records.
There are similar levels of dominance. But they require a food chain.
Phelps arrived at the Beijing pool Wednesday morning with three gold medals. He left with five. The latest two: The 200-meter butterfly, in which he swam to a record 1:52.03 despite his goggles filling up with water.
“I couldn’t see anything for the last 100,” he said. “It just kept getting worse and worse, and I was having trouble seeing the walls to be honest.”
He still touched the wall ahead of Hungary’s Laszlo Cseh. Maybe next time, somebody can tie an anchor to his leg.
Phelps added his fifth gold when he swam the first leg — and the fastest leg — of the 4x200 relay. The U.S. team’s winning time was 6:58.56. Second place is still swimming.
It’s not surprising Phelps could overcome that whole goggle thing. “One thing that separates Michael is the way he swims even when he doesn’t feel well,” his coach, Bob Bowman, said. “Michael kind of performs independently of his feelings. It gets back to knowing exactly what he wants to accomplish. He’s able to compartmentalize what’s important. It goes back to that quote, ‘Winning means: what’s important now.’ I think Michael is very good at knowing what’s important now.”
You know what Michael is? Michael is a freak.
In the 400 individual medley, possibly his toughest individual event, he won by over two seconds. In the 4x100 freestyle relay, he got a little help from teammate Jason Lezak, who swam the final 50 like Evinrude was stamped on his rump. The third gold: another world record in the 200 freestyle.
The question isn’t whether he’ll win but whether the other seven swimmers show up on the blocks holding pizza boxes.
He is now the winningest Olympian ever: 11 gold medals, 13 overall. He didn’t ever realize he was approaching an Olympic record shared by Carl Lewis, Mark Spitz and others the other day until being told by Bowman. But things tend to blur after 25 world records in individual Olympic events.
Some athletes are great because of natural ability and work ethic. Some become otherworldly when they find uncommon ways to motivate themselves. He denounced reporters who claim he’s circled Spitz’s record eight golds on his to-do list. But he is the one who said four years ago that he wanted to change swimming.
He admitted that he still uses the third-place finish (slacker) in Athens four years ago as motivation in the 200 free. And admitted he has been motivated to overcome post-Athens setbacks, including a DUI, a broken wrist and the blahs. Friends sent him “over 100” text messages after his first gold. “I was just thinking about all these text messages, saying, ‘We’re all rooting for you,” he said. “I got a little choked up.”
He was 15 when he made the Olympic team in 2000, the youngest swimmer to make it since 1932. He finished fifth in the 200 butterfly. It was a nice story.
Five months later, he broke the world record.
Three years and seven months later, he won six golds and two bronzes.
This year, maybe eight golds.
Please, stop him before he eats again.
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Bauerle’s Olympic-sized midlife crisis
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Beijing - The last time Jack Bauerle went through a midlife crisis, it played out like Benjamin Braddock’s pool party in, “The Graduate.”
Yes. Plastics.
“My dad was a manufacturer’s rep,” Bauerle said. “He did actually say to me one day: ‘Jackson. Plastics. It’s a big deal.’ His best friend invented the plastic straw.”
And so, for once in his life, Bauerle leapt into something other than water. He was making $3,000 a year as an assistant swim coach at Georgia. He left in 1977 to try out his father’s business.
“I knew in the first week I wanted out - actually I knew the first day,” he said. “But my dad made me stick it out a year.” A year later, longing for the smell of chlorine, he was back to Athens.
That was 30 years ago.
Jack Bauerle, on loan to the U.S. Olympic team, is in Beijing as the women’s head coach. Anybody who wonders about his qualifications need only look around. There are 10 swimmers from five nations here who swam for Bauerle at Georgia. That brings his Olympic count to 30 swimmers.
“Ten? Is that right?” Bauerle said. “I wish them the absolute best - unless it gets down to the wire against one of our’s.”
He says he wasn’t counting. But he admits he “can’t get through a warm-up” without bumping into a former Bulldog. If he needed to update his resume, all he would need is a camera on the pool deck. Start with Kara Lynn Joyce, who already has won a silver medal for the U.S. and knows why. “The last four years blows my mind. I don’t think I could’ve been as successful with any other coach,” she said.
The only thing Bauerle knows better than swimming is teenagers. Probably, that’s because he is one. His close friend, Chris Davis, joked that if Bauerle “walked into a room and the adults were on one side, he would end up on the other side with the kids. Casey Stengel said he looked in a mirror and saw a young man trapped in an old man’s body. That’s Jack. But as coaches, I think we’re all a little that way.”
They just don’t all travel the world to surf. It’s one of Bauerle’s passions. He returns to Atlanta Aug. 23, which will end seven and a half weeks on the road. Two weeks after returning, he’ll leave with Davis and two other friends to go surfing in Costa Rica.
Why Costa Rica?
“I left my board there last time,” he said.
But then, we’ve all been there.
The man is 56 years old. Just don’t tell him.
He has been surfing since he was 10 on the Jersey shore, and the scenery has gotten significantly better since then: California, Hawaii, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, England, Scotland. (Still on his water bucket list: Fiji and Cape St. Francis.) He owns seven surf boards, two of which are in his office at the Ramsey . He said he “chisels two trips” into his schedule every year.
Bauerle is an avid tennis player. He has run a marathon. He once combined the two and competed in a tennis marathon as a fundraiser. Bauerle and his partner played for 36 hours, resting only five minutes per hour.
Dumbest thing he’s ever done. When it was over, he said he felt as if “he had been dragged by a car.”
It gets worse.
“I literally hallucinated. I just saw people that were not there. I saw an old girlfriend who I hadn’t seen in 20 years. But my partner Chris [Brown] really went off the deep end. We had these 90-second changeovers. At one point, Chris comes over and says, ‘If I don’t start playing better I’m going to lose my scholarship.’”
This all must seem like a dream. It’s Bauerle’s third Olympics but first as a head coach.
As a swimmer at Georgia, he considered himself “mediocre at best.”
As a coach, “I just wanted to get things going. This was never on the radar.”
Swimming’s gain. Plastics’ loss.
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Tragedy of Olympic proportions
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Beijing — In another month, in another part of the world, it’s still a tragedy. Dead father. Critical mother. Grieving daughter. And the scum who did it takes the cowardly exit and leaps from a building.
The difference is that in another month, in another part of then world, these senseless acts otherwise blend into the scenery. In the Olympics, everybody notices. We would like to believe when nations come together for 17 days for reasons of medals and anthems every four years that everything else can be put on hold. But shouldn’t we know better by now?
The bomb in Centennial Park.
The stabbings at the Drum Tower in central Beijing.
No difference, except that this senseless act touched Olympic athletes closer to home. The wife of the U.S. men’s volleyball coach was touring this historic city with her parents Saturday. They were attacked. Now Todd Bachman is dead, Barbara Bachman is critical, their daughter Elisabeth is grieving and a group of young athletes and coaches — who only came here to compete for an Olympic medal — is trying to move forward.
The U.S. men’s volleyball team, which is ranked third in the world, won its first match against Venezuela Sunday. It wasn’t easy but they managed in five sets. Head coach Hugh McCutcheon skipped the game and certainly could be excused for missing the rest. He is with his wife, Elisabeth, a former Olympian who remains close to the program.
“He’s sorely missed by the players and coaches and myself,” said assistant Ron Larsen, who has taken over. “I’d much rather be sitting on the bench, telling him what I think he should be doing, and having him saying, ‘I don’t think so,’ rather than where I am right now.”
Some things you can’t prepare for. But the players did what they could. They wanted to put some sort of patch on their jerseys but there wasn’t enough time. So they wrote the Bachman’s initials, T.B. and B.B., on the back of their shoes. They also locked arms for a prayer just before the game, “taking a moment to let him know that we’re thinking about him,” said Ryan Millar.
Thomas Hoff, the team captain, said, “They were not going to start without us. We wanted to have a moment of silence where we could gather our thoughts before we started this journey.”
The team was 20 minutes into practice Saturday when the attack occurred. McCutcheon left to take a phone call and his players haven’t seen him since. They initially didn’t think much of his departure. But when they arrived for a team meeting two hours later and several USOC and federation officials were there, they knew something had happened. That’s when they were told the news.
McCutcheon held a conference call with his players later in the evening.
“He talked about trying to move on,” Hoff said. “He just told us, ‘It will be difficult, but together we’re going to be much stronger.’”
The U.S. women’s players actually knew the Bachmans better than the men’s team. Many were teammates of Elizabeth, whom most know as ‘Wiz.”
But Lloy Ball summarized the feelings of the men’s team, saying: “We were given horrific news about someone we love and care about whose family was attacked. Our knee-jerk reactions were like any other human being’s would be. We were angry. As a male [team], we tend to hide our feelings a lot. But there was definitely a moment when guys let off how they felt about the [things].”
Beijing is blanketed with 80,000 police, soldiers and security officials. Still, this happened.
Ball spoke to his wife by phone about the possibility of his family not making the trip from Indiana.
“Of course, she got on the plane,” he said. “You can’t live in fear or anger. All you can do is send your prayers and sympathies to the family and try to continue what Hugh would want us to do: Win a gold medal.”
Riley Salmon said, “My mom and dad will be here. They’re concerned for the Bachmans. They’re concerned about their own safety. But they’re coming here to support us.”
It’s what this stage is suppose to be about. But life still swirls around it.
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Difficult to see clear through the fog
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Juyongguan, China — When the various beleaguered dynasties in Chinese history were convincing themselves that a wall might actually cure themselves of those pesky Mongolians, it probably never occurred to them that they would be mocked centuries later by a goofy guy in spandex.
“If I was in charge back then, I wouldn’t have built something like this,” U.S. cyclist David Zabriskie said as he looked up at the apparently not-so-Great Wall. “It’s just like a waste of time. I mean, you can get over it with a grappling hook and a ladder, right?”
Cycling at the Wall. Maybe this can be the start of some new series of historical Olympic mutations. When the Games move to London in 2012: table tennis at Stonehenge.
One day after Opening Ceremonies, the Olympic cycling road race. It started in downtown Beijing at Yongdingmen Gate, the former entrance to Beijing’s old city wall, and finished 2,200 feet up a mountain. It was the first time the event began and ended in different locations, the local organizing committee figured they would make the most of it. So the finish line was placed at the JuYongGuan Pass, adjacent to the Great Wall.
About 800 years ago, Genghis Khan plowed through the Wall and took over northern China and, well, that should have sent a strong enough message that a winding and deteriorating wall wasn’t a great defense, even if it did stretch 4,000 miles. But when you combine smog, heat, humidity and an uphill climb over 245 kilometers (152 miles), it doesn’t make for great art.
Players gasped, coughed and generally wilted. After dropping out, Stefan Schumacher of Germany said: “It feels like you’re at 3,000 meters because of the air. You cannot breathe. The air is thick, and there is smog.” Juan Jose Haedo of Argentine said: “It feels like you have hot cream all over your body.”
The greater Beijing area doesn’t necessarily have the world’s worst air. There are plenty of nuclear-waste facilities. But you wonder why IOC president Jacques Rogge has gone to such great lengths to spin this matter.
His comment the other day: “The fog you see is based on the basis of humidity and heat. It does not mean to say that this fog is the same as pollution. It can be pollution, but the fog doesn’t mean necessarily that it is pollution.”
Rogge speaks five languages. Maybe it made more sense in Dutch.
Four members of the U.S. cycling team arrived in Beijing wearing masks over their nose and mouth — presumably to protect them from Rogge’s fog. That didn’t go over real well, and the USOC strongly suggested they issue a quick apology.
So it follows that when other team members were asked about the smog Saturday, they verbally tiptoed a response. “I’ve got to approach it with a little bit of reserve after the other members of the team got in a mess,” Zabriskie said.
But he couldn’t help himself. When reminded of Rogge’s fog comments, he said, “It’s best to give things like this a happy name. … We do the same thing in America. We call it haze.”
Zabriskie has lived in California. Doesn’t he know what smog looks like?
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s looks … familiar.”
If nothing else, Saturday’s race finally ended the myth that the Wall is visible from outer space. Because, like, I stood on what many consider the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” and I had an easier time seeing the other seven.
If walls could talk, what would this one say? How about, “Please, just let me be.”
Some cyclists sort of got into the backdrop. Christian Vande Velde of the United States said of riding the course through the Wall’s tunnels, “You feel like you’re going through a fake amusement ride.”
Probably a safe analogy.
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Sometimes sports answers tough politics
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Beijing — As it turns out, sports and politics can mix wonderfully.
A government rescues abducted children from a war-torn country. A 6-year-old boy crawls through a fence hole to escape the militia. The U.S. throws him a rescue line. He takes his first real shower and has “the best meal I’ve ever had” at a fast-food restaurant. High school, college, citizenship.
The story gets better.
Sports and politics more than mixed this time. Lopez Lomong, who once ran for his life, will run for a medal for the U.S. in the 1,500 meters. Could even a gold match what he felt Friday night as the flag-bearer for the U.S. team in Opening Ceremonies?
Sports and politics got it right. U.S. athletes have been answering questions for months about whether they would make political statements at these Olympics. Would they speak out about Tibet or Darfur? Will they lambaste China for its human rights record? Would they make use of their 15 minutes of fame?
“I’ve thought about that,” said Jessica Mendoza, a softball player. “We all have a goal of just getting that 15 minutes. What we do with it, I’m not sure.”
No reason to say a word now.
It doesn’t really matter whether political motives or just a really cool story prompted U.S. athletes to select Lomong to lead them into Beijing’s National Stadium. Either way, perfect choice.
In 2000, he was 15 and raking dirt in a refugee camp in Kenya when friends suggested they watch the Olympics on television. The closest TV was five miles away. They walked.
“It was five [Kenyan] shillings to get in,” Lomong said.
He paid the equivalent of seven cents to watch the Sydney Olympics in black and white. When he walked into the room, Michael Johnson was running the 400. “I said I want to be as fast as that guy. I want to wear that uniform.”
There were other worthy choices as flag-bearer. But nobody else had been chased through an African jungle.
As a 6-year-old, Lomong didn’t know about the civil war in the Sudan, the militia that destroyed villages, killed parents and abducted young boys with the intent of forcing them into being soldiers. But one day, in the village of Kimotong, militiamen broke into church as Lomong sat with his parents. They told everybody to lie down and directed the children outside. When Lomong’s father tried to fight, he was knocked to the ground.
“They dragged us all the way to a big truck, which was covered with canvas,” Lomong said. “I was crying.”
There were nearly 100 boys on that truck. They were driven far away, to a small, windowless building and imprisoned for three weeks. Back in Kimotong, Lomong’s parents searched for him for days. Eventually, they gave up hope, presumed him dead and held a funeral.
Lomong endured but saw death all around him. The boys were given water twice a day. The only “food” was a mixture of grasses and sand. Several died. “Kids would go to sleep and not get up the next day,” he said.
Instead, he escaped. A friend noticed a hole in a fence. “He came over to me and said, ‘At midnight, we’re going to see your parents,’” Lomong said. And as the guards spoke, four boys crawled in the dirt and through the hole.
They ran for three days. (“That’s when I started to race.”)
The four slept facing in one direction so they wouldn’t awake and run in a circle. When they reached the Kenyan border, they were arrested by officials and put in a refugee camp. It was Lomong’s home for 10 years, and he didn’t mind. He had presumed his parents were dead.
In 2001, the U.S. started a program to find homes for “The Lost Boys of the Sudan.” Lomong was in that first group of 3,600. His foster parents in upstate New York, Roger and Barbara Tully, picked him up at the airport. His first American meal was a chicken sandwich from McDonald’s, which he loved but couldn’t finish. The Tullys told him to discard the rest. But he took it home.
“In camp we had chicken twice: Christmas and Easter,” he said. One chicken for 10 boys. They made a soup with water and salt. “If there was a piece of chicken in [your bowl], Merry Christmas to you,” he said.
Lomong was 16 when he came to the U.S. He went to high school, then Northern Arizona University, and ran track. On July 6, 2007, he became a U.S. citizen. One year later to the day, he made the Olympic team.
Story gets better.
Last August, he was reunited with his parents. Three months later, he gave them a TV set. Color.
“I told them to watch me in the Olympics,” he said. “I didn’t even know if I would make it, but I did.”
He was asked Friday about Darfur and China’s record on human rights. He chose to stay clear of controversial comments, other than to say he was “disappointed” that fellow Team Darfur member Joey Cheek had his visa revoked by the Chinese government.
“He’s supposed to be here,” Lomong said. “He’s an Olympian. He’s supposed to tell people about the situation.”
It doesn’t matter now. No statement could’ve been louder than Lomong leading the U.S. team into the stadium. There’s your 15 minutes.
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Celebration returns to Beijing
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Beijing - Two teenage girls giggle as they approach, asking the frumpy middle-aged guy, who is sweating in humidity beyond an Atlanta August, if he wouldn’t mind posing for a picture.
“Please, it’s OK?” asks Yangru, as her friend rushes to hold up a small camera.
She is standing in Tiananmen Square, too young to have first-hand knowledge of what happened here 19 years ago, but old enough to know her history. She has heard or read the stories.
“This is very important place for all of China,” she said. “What happened here was bad. But now in Olympics, this is where we celebrate.”
A mural of Mao faces the square, looking down, as if still keeping watch. The square is filled with locals and tourists, perhaps surpassed only by police and security. Yangru (who gives only one name) continues talking when a security man suddenly approaches from behind her, stops and listens to the conversation. She ignores him. He eventually leaves. She smiles.
“We all hope for a happy ending,” she said.
Nineteen years after pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen turned bloody, seven years after thousands of Chinese celebrated in the very same square with the announcement of the Olympics, China tries to put on its best face tonight.
Opening Ceremonies doesn’t merely commence the 29th Olympics of the modern era, it’s the beginning of a country and a government putting itself center stage and asking, “What do you think of me?”
They have tried so hard to please here. You can’t ask a question without seven volunteers trying to get you an answer.
“What do you people in the United States think of China?” the man at the airport asks. And then he offers you a Marlboro.
In an ideal world, the Olympics are about sport and competition, free of any political fingerprints. Unfortunately, we know better. This has the potential to be the most politically charged of all Games.
The people this week have been great - almost Stepford-like. It follows the government has done a nice job clearing out almost everybody else. Dissidents have either been jailed or packed and shipped to remote areas of the earth. The protests that have popped up this week have been quickly squashed. Visas of perceived troublemakers have been revoked.
Most recently turned away: speedskater Joey Cheek. He donated his $25,000 gold medal bonus to humanitarian causes, and exemplifies the Olympic spirit better than most. But because he’s a co-founder of “Team Darfur” - which seeks to raise awareness of the conflict in the Sudan and blames China for doing nothing - his visa was rejected hours before his flight to Beijing.
(Postscript: The U.S. team named its flag bearer for the Opening Ceremonies Thursday - Lopez Lomong. The distance runner is a refugee from the Sudan, and also a member of Team Darfur.)
Locals don’t understand the perceived obsession with Tibet and Darfur and other human rights issues. They were hurt by the disruptions of the torch run in London, Paris and San Francisco. China has come so far and so fast, they believe.
Shouldn’t these Olympics be more of a coronation than global nitpicking?
“Most Chinese are quite excited to show off what they have done here,” said David Hseih, 51, who lived in Atlanta for seven years and now makes Beijing his home. “Many feel it wasn’t fair what happened during the torch run in Paris and other places. They think what China has achieved is worth mentioning and, minus whatever’s wrong, there’s a lot of things that have improved. People are living better. They have a lot more freedom.”
As for things like security guards ease-dropping on a conversation? Only a minor annoyance. It’s not worth their time. Not now. Not during these 17 days. Please, not tonight.
The black eye from 1989 in Tiananmen Square may never fully heal. People protested. Tanks rolled in. Hundreds to thousands died (depending on the source, government or students).
But in 2001, they celebrated in Beijing, and they will celebrate again tonight. Who could have imagined that?
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IOC can’t run away from responsibility, blame
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
On a recent trip to Beijing, a U.S. Olympic Committee official was laying on the bed in his hotel room watching CNN. It seemed like a normal newscast until a story began, “In Paris today …” — and the audio died and the screen went black.
We’ll never know what the story was about. But let’s assume it had more to do with protests over human rights violations than the secrets to making a lovely béarnaise sauce.
On Monday, I leave for the Beijing to cover the Olympics. The global news octopus notwithstanding, if I feel the need to catch up with past developments three blocks from my hotel when I return, there’s a reason.
Less than a week before Opening Ceremonies, Chinese officials continue to limit access to certain Internet sites carrying stories or blogs about Tibetan protests, personal independence or spiritual freedoms.
Fortunately, Big Brother will be hands off regarding any pre-season news about the SEC, unless Phil Fulmer suddenly takes a position on Tibet.
“There’s probably not much likelihood of that,” said Suzanne Wright, a China country specialist with Amnesty International, and Tennessee resident.
The IOC should have known better. For Jacques Rogge to say as recently as two weeks ago, “There will be no censorship of the Internet,” was at best blind and presumptuous and at worst a lie.
China should get only limited blame for this ugly feud. It is not going to change its government just because the Olympics are there for 17 days. And if the IOC really felt strongly about censorship and human rights, it never would have awarded the Games to China in the first place.
What we’re seeing now is massive global spin by one of the world’s most disingenuous and corrupt outfits. The reality is, as long as IOC officials still have a Ritz to sleep in, a Rolex waiting for them at check-in and an envelope back home with cruise tickets for Crete, all is well in their world.
Amnesty International considers it a small accomplish that China decided only Thursday night to unblock access to its Web site, as well as the BBC (Chinese language) and Radio Free Asia. But a question: Shouldn’t celebrating human rights be considered a part of the Olympic message?
“It is true that while the IOC has made some statements regarding human rights and is trying to influence China, overall they have really chosen not to speak out on the issue,” Wright said. “When they have talked about improvements they’ve made, they’ve been cherry-picking. They don’t talk about the overall situation, some of which are related to the Olympics.”
The three pillars of the Olympics are: sport, environment, culture. Amnesty International believes human rights should be a fourth pillar, and Wright said there are plans to approach the IOC following these Games.
Attempting to keep politics out of the Olympics is a noble but futile endeavor. Further, there are human rights violations directly related to these Olympics. China has been practicing “administrative detention,” in which protesters and otherwise perceived troublemakers are rounded up and taken to labor camps for a “re-education,” about the concepts of socialism and the like. This practice has been stepped up in the past year to clear the streets before the Games.
Many specifically protesting the Olympics coming to Beijing also have been arrested. One famous case involves Ye Guozhu. His home and restaurant were razed in 2004 to make way for new venues. Ye applied for a permit to protest. When he did so, he was charged with “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble,” Wright said.
Ye was jailed for four years. His sentence was to be completed last Saturday. But police took him from prison to another location. His family was told he will be “detained” until Oct. 1 for the benefit of the country.
IOC officials can do nothing about this. But it created the problem by awarding the Olympics to China. They can’t turn a blind eye or a deaf ear to the situation whether the screen goes black or not.
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