|
|
A while back a friend of mine and I were having a discussion of who are the 3 most dominant athletes right now and we came down to:Originally Posted by Luminaire
Phelps,
Roger Federer (this was a few months back before Nadal beat him)
and Tiger.
It's probably Phelps. He is a man among boys. I always wonder when Tiget plays who will give him his biggest challenge. When Phelps swims I am usually pretty certain no one will give him a big challenge.
If anyone can beat Phelps, it's Ryan Lochte. He won a couple medals in Athens while he was just a sophomore at Florida. Dominated the NCAA Championships all four years for the Gators. Saw him swim once while he was in college......un-freakin-believable.
Edit: That said, I still don't think Phelps will lose. But if he does, it would only be to Lochte.
China dominated men's team gymnastics. I don't know if anyone saw that one guy from team USA do his pommel horse routine, but it was AMAZING.
I believe they said he was an alternate filling in to get us enough team points to qualify. He was incredible!
I usually go out of my way to not buy into the hype of certain athletes, and since they have been hyping Phelps so much I haven't really paid a lot of attention.
I watched the 400 individual medley last night when he won gold and broke the world record, and couldn't help cheering for him. The piece where they talked about his history and interviewed his mom was cool. In that piece and his interview after winning the gold he seemed like a genuinely good guy. It's nice to see people like that win. I hope he wins all 8 gold medals.
Our MBB team sure put a beatdown on China as well.
We looked okay, but we can't defend the perimeter.
I"m afraid Spain may put the beatdown on us.
I was more worried about our perimeter shooting than our perimeter defending. But on the flipside China had 3 legit NBA players and we stuck it to them. It was a good game.
It's going to be interesting. Spain is the only team that REALLY concerns me, with Germany and always-dangerous Argentina (although they lost their opener today) factors.
16 years old, my desert tanned ass, China!
p.s. WOW, has Romania fallen off the gymnastics map these days. Horrible stuff all around.
First off, I don't even want to know how your ass got tanned, even in the desert. Second, who is supposedly 16?
I think all the good Romanians emigrated west and are competing for other countries. Our own Liukin is of Soviet Bloc lineage. Shawn Johnson's coach is from China (I think a former Olympian himself, if I'm not mistaken). Globalization has surely changed the face of the Olympics.
All of these 12 year old Chinese gymnasts! That's who!!
Minimum age for competition is 16. There's no way these girls are that old.
The deal, you see, is that they actually begin their gymnastics training in utero over there, so they have a head start. :icon_wink:
Actually, I am only partly joking. Athletes are VERY actively "encouraged" to marry one another, then their offspring get dibs at training schools, where some of them literally learn to walk, the training is so early and complete. Yao Ming is the product of that sort of informal genetic engineering (both of his parents were part of state-sponsored basketball programs back in the day).
My understanding is that now in China it has opened up and commercialized, so anybody with a little extra money can get their kid started early working on Olympic dreams. That kind of thing kicked into overdrive when China was announced as the host a few years ago.
There is definitely one Chinese girl who looks like she isn't over 13! The is dwarfed by the other girls who look young, or just about right at 16.
I didn't know it was physically possible for me to cheer out loud at my television for a swim race, but France just got ****whipped by Jason Leezak and the US in the men's 4 x 100m freestyle relay. And by ****whipped I mean by 8/100ths of a second. France talked some junk before the race saying they were going to "smash the Americans". The **** talker got ran down in the last 15 meters or so in dramatic fashion.
Phelps swam the lead leg of the race and is now 2/2 for gold in his events.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
