just saw the women's 4x100. damn!
caught a replay on bbc. nice to see bolt run through the finish line.
had he done that thursday, he probably breaks his record.
Maybe, but he was looking at the timer before he slowed down so he must have thought he wasn't going to get the record.
He split 43.58 in the 4x400 in a Jamaican meet back in 2010. You'd probably want to add 1.2 seconds or so to that for estimating his (more or less untrained) time in an open 400, but even so it's certainly suggestive of potential for greatness. He famously loathes 400 training though (who doesn't!), so my guess is he'd put seriously working on it off until he and his coach figure he's past his peak for the shorter sprints. I had read that he's expressed interest in the long jump, and he would indeed seem to have the assets for it. He'd be in some very good company expanding into either or both events, too (Carl Lewis, Jesse Owens, Michael Johnson, FloJo).
I got to believe he has given the long jump a try or two when no one was looking. I am sure his camp knows where the competition is at in these other events, and where he could expect to eventually place.
I can't help but wonder if the following is what athletes think on the medal podium:
Gold - I won!
Silver - Shit, I almost won
Bronze - Well, at least I got something
Mexico, a decided underdog, won the country’s first Olympic gold medal at the London Games — and first significant international soccer trophy of any kind — with a lively 2-1 victory over Brazil at Wembley Stadium on Saturday.
The diving needs more triple lindy's
If anyone here knows what I'm talking about, +1,000 internets for you.
I was just looking at Ireland's medal tallies and wow, I'm stunned to see the disparity between Ireland's results and New Zealand's - especially that Ireland got no medals at all in 2004. New Zealand's worst Olympics since our boycott of 1980 (hence zero medals, though about four or five Kiwi athletes did go and compete independently) is when we only got four in Sydney. Don't know what government investment in minority sports is like in Ireland, but we have been pouring a fair bit of money into our realistic medal chances. In fact the poor performance of our velodrome cyclists this year might prove controversial given the money invested in them.
Viva Mexico !!!
Murphy should have won a medal in the radial.
Eh, I dunno...I think when it takes someone as ridiculously head-and-shoulders above the competition as Bolt to get people enthused about watching your sport, that probably doesn't say much for its potential audience. It seems to me you could just as easily argue (which I wouldn't, but just for the sake of it) that if anything, he's ultimately bad for the sport, because he feeds into the layman's fantasy that greatness=being such a once-in-a-century freak of nature as to make it look positively easy, rather than merely becoming the current best through a combination of talent and gruelingly hard work. 100M records are usually a matter of shaving off a couple hundredths of a second in a race that comes down to a lean, not the visually arresting spectacle of a guy with a dramatically different build from everyone else cruising a full two-tenths of a second ahead of the pack (while visibly slowing down to showboat, and having his shoelace untied...).Women's track has a hard time getting attention when they have no chance of setting a WR in the sprints. People know Usain Bolt could set a record every time out and they want to see it. Not so with the women.
he feeds into the layman's fantasy that greatness=being such a once-in-a-century freak of nature as to make it look positively easy, rather than merely becoming the current best through a combination of talent and gruelingly hard work.
wikiThe 4 x 400 metres relay or long relay is an athletics track event in which teams comprise four runners who each complete 400 metres or one lap. It is traditionally the final event of a track meet. At top class events, the first 500 metres is run in lanes.
Start lines are thus staggered over a greater distance than in an individual 400 metres race; the runners then typically move to the inside of the track.
slightly off topic: i loved watching the track relays this evening. relays in any sport are inherently thrilling. my question is how do they determine who staggers where in the start.