The Latest Olympics Controversy

Perhaps goaded into it by NBC's rah-rah USA coverage of the games, the International Olympic Committee is asking for an investigation of members of China's women's gymnastic team, which is rumored to include athletes who are well under the age limit of 16. (I don't hear a lot of hue and cry from NBC for someone, anyone to check 16-year-old Shawn Johnson's paperwork.)

If the China team members are stripped of their medals, the USA would be bumped to team gold. Individually, so would Nastia Liukin, who technically tied with He Kexin (one of those under scrutiny) on the uneven bars, but was awarded the silver medal on the basis of a tiebreaker.

Makes a doping scandal seem quaint, now, doesn't it?

So True

Here's a blog post from Matt Roush, who seems to swallow the NBC Olympic line hook, line and sinker.

However, scroll down the page, where a user comment rings truer than anything else on the page:

The coverage of the Olympics on NBC is a disgrace. Whole swathes of sports are ignored while primetime NBC shows almost 24 hour old footage of women's gymnastics qualifying.

Swimming is billed as live despite it happening 5 hours ago. The Chinese have already arranged the swimming finals to co-incide with U.S. prime time viewing. At least show them live.

As for the little "heart warming" stories go, who cares? Save them for when there is no live sport to show.

It would have been nice to have watched the opening ceremony with the rest of the world too.

Thank heavens for the BBC and their excellent, jingo free, live Olympics service on their sports website.

The Olympics are meant to be a celebration of the world coming together in the spirit of competition and peace. NBC manage to change it into another "America against the world" event instead.

2006 Winter Olympics

As the dust clears from Torino, time to assess the Winter Games just ended.

I usually love watching the Winter Games - I got really hooked in '76 - but I wasn't as engaged this year as I was the last time around, the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. The difference was perhaps due to the changes in my life this year, because watching the Olympics was one of Nancy's favorite things to do too. While I did have a week at home to watch due to winter break at school, I really didn't care much about the last week's events. I even skipped the closing ceremonies - but then, so did most of the athletes. (I watched instead the "Dancing With The Stars" finale. Glad to see Cheryl Burke and that what's-his-name she was dancing with win the thing.)

Back to Torino...

What I liked: The women's curling team. Love those Johnson sisters! The curling coverage (anchored by Don Chevrier and Don Duguid) was like an island of honest television amidst all of NBC's other rah-rah hype. Also, happy to see Apolo Anton Ohno finally hit the gold, and Julia Mancuso with her tiara was a refreshing presence during the games - and she got a gold medal, too.

What I didn't like: Bode Miller. What a jake. Pocket the Nike money, then underperform for your country. Two also-rans, 3 DQ's - the Olympic Spirit, 2006 style. And the "should have stayed home" award goes to Michelle Kwan, hanging on to the last thread of her talent as a figure skater. It's time for the Emily Hughes generation to take over, and you should have known that, Michelle.

There was no one moment that defined the 2006 Games for me, unlike 2002, where Emily Hughes' older sister Sarah turned a lot of heads and won a lot of hearts with her great night of skating in Salt Lake City. 2002 was the Year of Sarah Hughes. I can't find anyone to hang that sobriquet on this year. Hopefully 2010 will be better.

Sarah Hughes Update

See below for an update to my little story yesterday about Sarah Hughes. How fitting her first endorsement (if you can call it that, this seems more like an honor) is for the "Breakfast Of Champions."

Sarah Hughes, America's Skating Sweetheart

There's been too much death and disappointment on this blog lately. So today I want to talk about someone who has brightened this nation's spirits since, oh, about 11 p.m. on Thursday night.

That's right. Sarah Hughes. The third-stringer on the three-woman U.S. figure skating team. The youngest of the US competitors.

The young lady who proved everyone wrong. The girl who proved that anything is possible, if all the cards fall right.

At approximately 11:00 p.m. Thursday I arrived home from band practice to see the top skaters. When I arrived home, Sarah was first to go on, the fourth-place skater, with the top three at the time - Michelle Kwan, Irina Slutskaya, and Sasha Cohen - yet to skate. Resplendent in a new lavender skating dress, Sarah Hughes took the ice. She first landed an easy double axel and then proceeded to land four triples in the first minute and a half of her routine, including a triple-triple. No problems. All the jumps were landed beautifully. Sarah seemed to feed off the crowd's reaction and continued towards a close-to-perfect program. The TV commentators, Scott Hamilton and Sandra Bezic, couldn't find any fault. Neither could the judges, but you had to figure they were giving Sarah lower marks to make room for the others should their programs, God forbid, be better than Sarah Hughes' masterpiece.

The top three ladies' programs were not up to what Hughes had accomplished, with Kwan and Cohen falling and Slutskaya's only slightly better, and by dint of the way placement is dictated by the rules of judging (yes, they do still exist, in spite of the Sale-Pelletier debacle of the week earlier), a higher placement in one category by one judge (from Finland) gave the thinnest of edges to Sarah Hughes.

And it did not stop there. At the Champions' Exhibition the following evening, Sarah (dressed in a beautiful black sequined pants outfit with elbow-length gloves) wowed the crowd with two routines, the first of which showed the 16-year-old skater showing insouciance and flirtatiousness belying her years as she did another flawless performance to the tune of "Bye Bye Blackbird". The second special performance (with Hughes back in the now-famous dress she won the Gold in) included a recorded introduction by Hughes declaring herself a New Yorker affected greatly by the events of September 11, 2001.

If you didn't absolutely fall for Sarah during these past two nights, you have no heart at all.

The 16-year-old from Long Island has suddenly become the Olympic Sweetheart. And as they like to say on one of the pro skating tours, "Winning is just the beginning". In spite of her having no agent at this time, expect to see Sarah making the rounds of the talk circuit (with her first stop possibly being the New York-based Rosie O'Donnell show, since Rosie is also from L.I.), getting some nice endorsement deals [update: her first is Wheaties, she unveiled the box with her image on it in Salt Lake City on Monday --D.M.], and skating in as many exhibitions as her school schedule will permit. There will be a parade at a future date [now confirmed for Sunday, March 3 starting at 11:00 am --D.M.] through her home town of Great Neck. What is so nice about Sarah is she is still devoted to her friends and family, and manages the time for a social life outside skating.

It could not have happened to a nicer person. And the real kicker is I could have told you all this before the Olympics even began. I said to my wife, "You know that Sarah Hughes is going to win the Gold Medal. Forget about Michelle's destiny. Youth will be served."

Congrats, Sarah... we will be watching you in the future.