News feeds
E-mail alerts
Mobile
Text alerts
Twitter
Facebook
Award-winning columnist Tom Archdeacon — an old-school storyteller in a brand-new venue — writes about sports, the city, southwest Ohio and anything else that catches his fancy… or yours.Home > Blogs > Through the Arch > Archives > 2008 > August
August 2008
BLOG: Scorpions, Squat Toilets and Kobe
BEIJING — I leave China with many questions unanswered:
How can folks here eat scorpions, silk worms and yak, seal and snake penis? That’s right, there’s one Beijing restaurant that serves nothing but penis.
How do they handle those no-commode squat toilets?
How do they remember those 30,000 pictograms that make up the written Chinese language?
And yet the biggest mystery for me is how did Kobe become King of China?
Hands down, the most popular athlete of the Beijing Games was the the Los Angeles Lakers’ Kobe Bryant.
The other night after a late game and a long stint in drug testing, Bryant emerged from the hoops arena into the Beijing night at about 1:30 a.m. And there, in the non-stop rain that had been falling for hours, waited several dozen people, their handmade signs soggy — the inked messages running off the cardboard — but their affections as warm as ever.
At each game during the U.S. run to the gold medal here, the Chinese crowd would continually chant “Ko-Be!…Ko-Be.!”
When his white-capped, blue blazer image flashed on the giant overhead video screens in the Bird’s Nest stadium during Opening Ceremonies, the crowd went nuts.
The other day the Beijing Youth Daily, one of the best read, most respected newspapers here had a glossy poster of Bryant wrapped around its paper. The headline read: “Kobe — Nobody Can Compare.”
Over the the past two basketball seasons, Bryant’s jersey has been the top seller in China, where it is estimated there are 450 million NBA fans. By the way, Boston’s Kevin Garnett is No. 2 in sales and Yao Ming’s jersey has dropped to 10th.
This past year, one of the most popular shows on Chinese TV was Kobe Mentu — or Kobe’s Disciples — a reality TV show where fans eventually travelled to the U.S. to be mentored by Bryant.
While he remains a debatable figure in the U.S., Bryant is like Michael Jordan and Elvis all rolled into one over here.
“We all thought we were somebody until we came over here with him,” New Orleans star Chris Paul told Palm Beach Post writer Hal Habib.
Bryant is as taken aback by the love fest as anybody.
“To be honest, I can’t explain it at all,” he said.
Part of the explanation is that he’s he’s made five lengthy Nike-sponsored trips here over the years to put on clinics with people throughout the country,
At the Games, Bryant — who also speaks fluent Italian and Spanish — was a man of the world, maybe more so than any other U.S. Olympian. He attended beach volleyball games, soccer matches,. swimming, track and field and women’s basketball.
And then there was his ply on the court as he led the U.S. team — the Redeem Team — to again establish itself as THE force in world basketball
And when Sunday’s final had ended and the American players were decorated with their gold medals, the Chinese crowd had just one thing to say:
“Ko-Be!…Ko-Be!…Ko-Be!”
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment |
BLOG: A Mike Tyson Shopping Experience
BEIJING — Well, I just took in THE contact sport of the Beijing Olympic Games.
Boxing?
Oh no — think more contact.
Wrestling, judo, maybe taekwondo?
Nope, all too tame.
I’m talking about shopping at Beijing’s famed Silk Market, where the experience is like Let’s Make A Deal, American Gladiators and a ride on the Tilt-A-Whirl at the county fair all wrapped into one.
I spent two hours there and it felt as if I’d been in the ring 10 rounds with Mike Tyson. Actually, he’d be a walk in the park compared to this. All he’d do is knock you out or bite off your ear.
The chattering, pushing, grabbing, haggling, cajoling, conning, relentlessly pleading ladies who run the seemingly thousands of stalls here, would never stop with a single bloody ear.
They’re all trying to get you into their little four-foot-wide , over-stuffed world of bogus Pumas, Nikes, North Face jackets , under the counter knock-off Louis Vuitton purses and Chanel jackets. There’s also some beautiful Chinese handicrafts, jewelry, traditional Chinese clothes, electronic goods, t-shirts, well you get the idea — everything under the sun.
And every sale is a matter of dramatic back-and-forth debate. The performances on their part are worthy of an an Academy Award, while for you it’s enough just trying keep your wits and your wallet.
The way it goes is the vendor punches in a price on a hand held calculator and passes it over to you. You hit the erase button and punch in your figure. The vendor looks terribly hurt, tells you “what good deal” she “make for you” and punch in another number. This goes on and on until your head is spinning and you usually give in.
I made the mistake early on of starting in on one of these negotiations, getting cold feet and trying to walk away, Next thing I know, I literally had an old lady latched onto one forearm and two young gals pulling at the other as I dragged them down the crowded aisles while every few feet some other shop keep tried to wrest me from their grasp and start their own sales pitch.
Hyleas Fountain, the Kettering heptathlete who won bronze at the Olympic Games here last week had the same experience when she shopped the Silk Market a coupe of days ago.
“I bought quite a few things there for my family and for the people who helped me get ready for the Games, but I’ll tell you, it’s a little different than shopping in the States,” she said in an understatement worthy of a gold medal.
“It was definitely draining for me.. Everybody’s touching you. I’m not sure if I liked that too much. I had one woman smack me. I told her I didn’t really appreciate that and it kind of backed her up. But they were right back on me a few feet further down the way.”
I went there to buy my wife a few things and while I thought I bartered pretty well on one or two items, I pretty much got taken for a ride on some of the others.
I did strike what I thought was one great deal, but I didn’t have the nerve to follow through on it.
I was looking at ornamental hand fans and one beautiful young girl — probably 20 or so — put the hard sell on. We had passed the calculator back and forth a couple of times and finally she smiled and said “100 more yuan, I come to your house and fan you every day.”
Sounded great to me, but I didn’t think it would go over so well with the wife.
Besides there’s no way me, this gal and that fan would all fit in the doghouse.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment |
Blog: Wignall done; Fountain about to get silver
BEIJING — On a day when one Dayton-area Olympian’s medal hopes were dashed, another’s appear about to be upgraded.
Washington Township hurdler Maurice Wignall — running for his native Jamaica Thursday night at Beijing’s steamy, rain-splashed Bird’s Nest Stadium — finished sixth in final of the men’s 110-meter hurdles.
Saying his stride got out of sync through the mid-hurdles Thursday, Wignall finished in 13.46 seconds.
The event was won by Cuban world-record holder Dayron Robles in 12.93 seconds. America’s David Payne won the silver medal with a 13.17 finish and his U.S. teammate David Oliver took bronze in 13.18.
“I’ve got to say, it’s still been a good Olympics,” said Wignall, who finished fourth in the event at the 2004 Games and trained for Beijing at Centerville High. “I tried my best today. I was very rusty. I guess I was going faster than I thought, then I just got into trouble about hurdle three or four.
“I tried to correct all of that — tried to get quicker strides and get them shorter — but it just got me closer and closer to every hurdle. So finally I just tried to hold on and see what place I could get.”
Kettering heptathlete Hyleas Fountain is holding on as well to see what place she’s about to get.
Last weekend she won a bronze medal in the competition, but Thursday the International Olympic Committee’s Disciplinary Commission announced that both the A & B urine samples of Ukrainian silver medalist Lyudmila Blonska tested positive for the anabolic steroid methyltestosterone.
She’s been provisionally suspended from all Olympic competitions — she was third going into Friday’s long jump finals — and her Olympic accreditation has been provisionally suspended.
The IOC Executive Board will announce its final decision soon, but it appears the 30-year-old Blonska is about to be banned from international competition for life. She served a doping suspension between 2003-05, so this would be her second offense.
If she is bounced, Fountain would move up to the silver medal and Russia’s Tatiana Chernova would get bronze.
“Hyleas just called me and told me what’s happening,” Lynn Smith, Fountain’s personal coach and the Central State women’s track coach, said late Thursday night. “There’s word (Blonska) has been removed from the Athlete’s Village.
“The thing is, all you can do is worry about yourself, but really there’s more to it than that. I had a couple of other coaches in years past say when you have a clean athlete, you look at it as these other people as someone who’s stealing from you.”
That’s exactly how British heptathlete Kelly Sotherton sees it.
She won the bronze medal in the heptathlon at the 2004 Athens Games and finished fifth here. Over the past two years, she’s been a vocal critic of Blonska, who won the silver medal in the heptathlon at last year’s world championships in Osaka, Japan, and took gold in the pentathlon at the 2006 world indoor championship in Moscow.
“I’ve been saying all along that she got caught doping when she was scoring 6,300 points, how can she not be doping and scoring 6,800?” Sotherton told reporters. “I have not seen any of her results since early June and then she comes out here and is producing good performances, which was suspicious.
“The thing I hope for is that the Russian and American who will be upgraded, get their medals in a proper official presentation. Otherwise they have lost that moment forever.”
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment |
blog: Wignall in Hurdles Finals in Beijing
BEIJING — With a crafty last-second bob at the tape, Maurice Wignall ducked beneath China’s Shi Dongpeng to claim the fourth and last qualifying spot in his 110-meter hurdles Olympic semifinal heat at Beijing’s rocking Bird’s Nest stadium, Wednesday night.
That means for the second Olympic Games in a row, the 32-year-old elite Washington Township athlete — who trained at Centerville High and runs for his native Jamaica — will be in the finals of the 110-meter hurdles. The race will be run Thursday night in Beijing (Thursday morning in Dayton).
Wignall qualified at 13.40 seconds. Six of the eight hurdlers who made the final had faster times, with Cuban world-record holder Dayron Robles leading the way at 13.12. Two Americans will be in the field as well. David Payne qualified at 13.32 and David Oliver, who won Wignall’s heat, ran 13.31.
Coming off the final hurdle, Wignall was sandwiched between Spain’s Jackson Quinonez on his left and Shi on his right.
In a similar situation in the finals at the Athens Games, he was nosed out of a bronze medal by 1/100th of a second when Cuba’s Anier Garcia lunged past him at the last second.
That moment flashed across his mind as headed to the last hurdle Wednesday night.
“I felt the Chinese guy and the other guy on my left, I felt everybody. It’s hard not to feel everybody,” he said. “I thought I’d have to come off the last hurdle, keep my composure and then try to dip at the right time. I did and it worked.”
He and Quinonez crossed the line in 13.40. Shi, surprised by the Wignall move, stumbled and finished at 13.42.
Asked about this chances now, Wignall just grinned:
“I have to see what happens tomorrow. I’m not a prophet.”
He is a crafty veteran and that’s why he’s in the finals.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment |
Blog: An Eye For Controversy
BEIJING — So now a fourth controversial photo has emerged showing Olympic athletes posing in a team photo while pulling back the skin on the sides of their eyes in an — you chose the qualifier here — offensive, derogatory, racist, innocent, affectionate, funny reference to Chinese people.
My vote is for offensive.
And yet I know I can’t claim to come from the most culturally sensitive state. Not as long as we still have Chief Wahoo grinning away atop every Cleveland Indians ball cap.
Anyway, here at the Beijing Olympics, a two-week-old photo has surfaced of four women soccer players from the Argentina team posing in their blue uniforms as they pull their eyes back. The image was published in the Argentine sports newspaper Ole.
Before that, it was Spain’s Federation Cup tennis team — one that had just beaten China in a pre-Games competition — posing at a dinner party, their eyes pulled tight in what one reference called “a Chinaman’s pose.”
And before that, the whole debate was ignited by full-page ads of the Spanish men’s and women’s Olympic basketball teams in Marca, the country’s best selling sports daily.
Done as an ad for the courier company Seur, official sponsor of the Spanish Basketball Federation, it shows the 15 Spanish players using both hands to pull back their eyes in what is supposed to be the stereotypical Chinese look
Ironically, Spain’s basketball teams have been sponsored by and now wear uniforms made by the Chinese company Li Ning since 2002. And they just signed an agreement to continue the partnership through 2012.
As the photos have drawn worldwide attention, the interpretational debate has intensified and often gotten quite nasty.
The Spanish teams don’t see what the big stink is about. The basketball federation said the ad was a gesture of “love, sympathy and appreciation toward the Chinese people and their country.”
Only Pau Gasol, the Los Angeles Laker from Spain, seems to have some reservations about being a part of the photo, though he said it’s “absurd” to call to it racist.
“Some of us didn’t feel comfortable doing it just because to me it was a little clownish for our part to be doing that,” Gasol told media members at Beijing Normal University.
“But the sponsors insisted and insisted. I think it is just a bad idea, but it was never intended to be offensive or racist against anybody. I didn’t find it very funny. I didn’t find it offensive, either. I guess some guys didn’t mind.
“I don’t want to be that way, to be doing that stuff. If anybody feels offended by it, we totally apologize for it. We never meant anything offensive by it.”
While the debate goes on, sometimes karma takes care of matters best.
Take those women soccer players from Argentina.
They lost all three of their Olympic games , including a 2-0 defeat to China in their final match.
Permalink | Comments (15) | Post your comment |
BLOG: Wignall Advances to Semi-Finals
BEIJING — Getting faster and faster as each Olympic round goes by, Maurice Wignall advanced to the semi-finals of the 110 meter hurdles at the Beijing Olympic Games Tuesday night at the Bird’s Nest stadium.
The Washington Township hurdler who runs for Jamaica won his heat in 13.36 seconds, his fastest time of the season. It was the fourth fastest time among the 32 hurdlers in Tuesday’s second round heats.
U.S. hurdler David Oliver clocked the fastest time at 13.16. Cuban world record holder Dayron Robles was second at 13.19 and American David Payne was third at 13.234. Poland’s Artur Noga tied Wignall’s 13.36 mark.
This is Wignall’s second Olympics. He finished fourth at the 2004 Athens Games. For Beijing, he did much of his training alone at Centerville High School, where he said Elks’ personal were especially accommodating.
His wife Janelle — herself a two-time swimming Olympian for Jamaica and a Wright State assistant swim coach — was in Beijing Tuesday night, but not at the stadium. She couldn’t get a ticket.
Wignall — who competes in the semi-finals Wednesday night — declined comment after his run Tuesday night.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment |
BlOG: “Ohhhh So Sexy”
BEIJING — I walked up to the only driver at the cab stand outside my media village early the other morning — a guy who looked like Peter Lorre and smelled like lots of English Leather — and handed him a small piece of paper filled with Chinese characters that bore my destination across town.
A Chinese lady had written them down for me since almost no cab drivers speak English and the only Mandarin I know would serve me best in a tavern, not a taxi cab.
So anyway, the cabbie looks at my card, smiles warmly and nods. He was so pleased to have me in his cab, he insisted — and I mean insisted — I sit up front, not in the back.
I’m thinking “Okay, this is my lucky day. I’ve finally got a cabbie who knows just where he’s headed”.
And boy this guy did — a thought that now makes me squirm.
To appreciate my initial joy, understand that usually when you hand a driver your directions card, he stares at it quizzically, frowns, shakes his head and begins mumbling in Chinese. He looks at you, you shrug, he shrugs, you shrug and he motions for you to get in the cab.
Next thing you know you’re in a swell of non-stop traffic of all stripes: Cars, trucks, busses, all kinds of motor bikes— some three wheelers I’ve seen have what look like mini, wooden outhouses on the back — bicycles carrying entire families and others with what appear to be a dump truck loads of junk lashed to them Beverly Hillbillies style.
And it’s after driving several minutes through this maze that your driver often holds up your card, mumbles more Chinese and you realize he doesn’t have a clue where we’re going. Sometimes he’ll pull over and show someone along the street the card and they both debate.
One guy driving me finally called his wife on her cell phone, who called her friend who spoke English, who then called his cell phone and asked to speak to me. I told her where I was going in English, she told him and everybody was happy.
But the other day all that seemed so unnecessary. Like I said, I’d found a guy who knew exactly where he was headed.
So just as we’re about to pull away from the cab stand , he looks over at me and with his right hand, gently touches the end of my white fu manchu moustache and then my white sideburn and offers a guttural, “Ohhhh.”
Seemed pretty weird to me, but I figured this was probably one of the cultural quirks over here. Many Chinese people seem pretty curious of people who look a lot different than they do.
So we drive a couple of lights and he points to his smooth forearm, then reaches across and gently runs the hair on my arm. And then he takes my arm, raises it to his cheek, so the hairs just touch his skin and again says, “Ohhhh.”
I’m still thinking — or maybe it was hoping by now — that this was still some kind of cultural disconnect. I said to myself, ‘Hey, Chinese people are pretty fascinated by strangers.’ I’d had at least a dozen of them ask to pose for photos with me. Lots more just stared. So I figured this was just some of that taken to the extreme.
But a light further, Mr. Lorre and Leather reaches over again and touching the moustache, this time more guttural than before, goes “Ohhhh so sexy.”
I nod toward the road but he tries some kind of light karate chopping deal on my knee. As I’m reaching over to tell him I’m about to Jackie Chan his chops, he shoots his hand up my leg and, yep, right into the old cajones.
By then I said to hell with culture and gave him a little cuff on the side of the head to get him refocused on the road. I would have hopped out, but he’d put my Chinese instructions in his shirt pocket and I would have been somewhere in the middle of Beijing, late for an appointment and with no lifeline.
So as we drive along the next 20 minutes in uncomfortable silence, I find myself thinking about a scene from an Austin Powers movie, the one where Goldmember asks Dr. Evil: “Can I paint his yoo-hoo gold? It’s kind of my thing, you know.”
And that’s when Dr. Evil goes, “How ‘bout no, you crazy Dutch bastard?”
So we finally get to my destination — a 30 minute ride that seemed like an hour — and when I get out of the cab, he just smiled and said:
“Please to meet you.”
On the way home, I again got a driver who had no clue where he was headed.
And that was just fine with me.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment |
BLOG: Amidst Stunning Injuries, Wignall Advances in Hurdles
BEIJING — On a morning when China’s national hero Liu Xiang and America’s two-time Olympic medalist Terrence Trammel both dropped out of their first-round heats in the 110-meter hurdles with injuries, Washington Township’s Maurice Wignall advanced to second-round competition at the Bird’s Nest Stadium.
The top four finishers in each of the six first-round heats Monday, Aug. 18, advanced and Wignall — a two-time Olympian who runs for Jamaica — finished fourth in Heat 4. His time —13.61 seconds — was the second slowest of the 24 hurdlers who advanced to Tuesday’s heats.
“The thing was just to survive and conserve yourself for the next round, so I’m pleased,” Wignall said.
The news of the day was Liu Xiang pulling up lame after taking one step out of the blocks in Heat 5. As he walked off the track there was a universal gasp in the stadium and soon many Chinese people were weeping.
While Yao Ming is the face of Chinese sports in the Western world, Liu Xiang is the top hero in the homeland. He’s the poster boy of these Olympics after he stunned the world by winning gold in the event at the Athens Olympics in 2004.
That’s the same race where Wignall — husband of Janelle Atkinson Wignall, Wright State’s assistant swim coach and a two-time swimming Olympian herself — finished fourth, edged out of a bronze by 1/100th of a second when a Cuban hurdler lunged past him at the tape.
Xiang had been hobbled by injuries recently, but — under great pressure to represent his nation and represent it well — was expected to compete here. But according to China’s national team coach Feng Shuyong, he suffered a set back during training on Saturday.
Monday’s injury appeared to be a painful problem involving his right Achilles tendon.
As for Trammell, who won Olympic silver medals in the 110 hurdles at both the Sydney and Athens Games, he pulled up after clearing one hurdle in his heat. He then grabbed his left hamstring, hobbled a few yards down the track and collapsed.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment |
Blog: Fountain Takes Bronze
BEIJING — Kettering’s Hyleas Fountain won the Olympic bronze medal in the women’s heptathlon here Saturday night and immediately afterward — with the National Stadium on its feet cheering and the American flag wrapped around her shoulders — she took a celebratory lap around the track with the entire rest of the field.
Along the way she found herself fighting tears when she thought about how her dream — first embraced as a child and in the past year polished mostly in solitude on the tracks at Fairmont High and Central State University — had finally been realized.
She finished with 6,619 points. Ukrainian gold medalist Natalia Dobrynska had 6,733 points. Silver medalist Lyudmila Blonska, also Ukrainian, finished with 6,700.
Fountain was first in three of the four events — 100 meter hurdles, high jump and 200 meters— in Friday’s first day of competition and had the lead overnight.
Saturday, she finished seventh in the long jump, 18th in the javelin throw and seventh in the final event, the 800 meter run, where she ran a personal record 2:15.45 and likely saved her medal.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Post your comment |
BLOG: Fountain Slips to Second After Long Jump
BEIJING — Hyleas Fountain dropped into second place in the Olympic heptathlon competition after finishing seventh in the long jump competition Saturday morning at Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium.
With two events remaining — the javelin and 800 meter run, both of which will take place Saturday night — Fountain has 5,029 points.
Ukraine’s Natalia Dobrynska — who won the long jump with a leap of 21 feet 9 inches — leads with 5,045 points. Ukraine’s Lyudmila Blonska and Russia’s Anna Bogdanova are tied for third with 4,913 points.
Fountain — who began the day wearing the blue leader’s bib, the heptathlon’s answer to the Tour de France’s yellow jersey — fouled on her fist two long jump attempts and finally took a safe approach and jumped early on her third and final attempt, clearing 20-feet 11 1/4 inches
The long jump is one of Fountain’s best events — she went 22 feet 7 inches at the U.S. Olympic Trials — and certainly left a couple of hundred points out there in the pit Saturday
Friday, she finished first in three of the day’s four events — 100 meter hurdles, high jump, 200 meters — and was 19th in the shot put.
Lynn Smith, Fountain’s personal coach and the women’s track coach at Central State, said Friday that there was a group of six women he thought would vie for the gold here.
“They are so close that they could either be first or sixth and it wouldn’t surprise me,” he said.
The event is seen as wide open in these Olympics since Sweden’s Carolina Kluft, the defending Olympic gold medalist and three-time world champ. decided to change events and is competing in the long jump and triple jump.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment |
Blog: Fountain Leads Heptathlon After Day 1
BEIJING — At the end of the first of two days of competition, Kettering’s Hyleas Fountain is leading the Olympic heptathlon.
After winning the 100-meter hurdles in 12.78 seconds and tying for first in the high jump with a leap of 6 feet, 1 1/4 inches, she slipped to second place in the points totals behind Ukraine’s Natalia Dobrynska after finishing 18th in the shot put with a heave of 43 feet, 10 inches, an inch and a quarter less than her personal record at the U.S. Olympic Trials.
But the 27-year-old Fountain had the National Stadium crowd roaring again Friday night when she won the 200 meters in 23.21 seconds.
She now has 4,060 points while Dobrynska is second with 3,996 and Great Britain’s Kelly Sotherton is third with 3,938.
Although she declined comment with the rest of the U.S. and international media when she trotted through the mix zone coming off the track late Friday night — in part, I believe, because of some cramping high in her hamstrings — she did take a minute with the Dayton Daily News as she came limping down an athletes’ hallway away from the press.
“Oh yeah, I’m pleased,” she said. “I had two huge PRs today, so I’m pretty excited about it. And the shot, I’m happy with it, too. It was my second-best throw ever so I can’t be too mad about that.”
She claimed she wasn’t drained from a day’s exertion in the Beijing heat because she kept hydrated and managed to slip back to the Athletes Village for a couple of hours rest during the competition break early Friday afternoon.
Saturday (Beijing time), she’ll go for a medal as the heptathlon wraps up with the long jump, javelin and 800 meters. She won the first two events at the U.S. Trials and finished 13th in the 800.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment |
BLOG: Fountain Is Winning the Crowd and the Competition
BEIJING — The reaction of the crowds to Kettering’s Hyleas Fountain tells you everything you need to know about the ongoing women’s heptathlon competition at these Olympic Games.
Take the high jump — the second of seven events in the draining two-day competition — which took nearly four hours to complete in Friday afternoon’s Beijing heat and humidity at the Bird’s Nest stadium.
For some of the other women in the competition — specifically the diminutive Marie Collonville of France and the demonstrative duo, Lyudmila Blonska of Ukraine and Russia’s Anna Bogdanova — the crowd, the kind that would love a karaoke bar, I bet, all wanted to get into the act, and for each began an impassioned rhythmic clap.
It was meant to lift each of them — to help an underdog against the withering elements and a dominating presence.
And that brings us to Fountain.
The crowd didn’t embrace her the same way. Through most of the competition there have been no “we’ll lift you” claps.
Instead everyone is watching in awe.
Fountain is not the little engine that could. She looking more like the locomotive.
She’s built more muscularly than the other front-runners. On the sidelines she’s more intense. There’s no playing to the crowd. Instead she’s a study of intense focus. She’s rolls on her back and shoulders and bicycles her legs in the air to stay loose. She stretches and grimaces, paces and jumps in place — anything to get that machine-like body fully engaged.
And it has been.
After winning the 100-meter hurdles Friday morning in 12.78 seconds, she came back right after that and tied Australia’s Kylie Wheeler for first in the high jump at 6-feet-1 1/4 inches.
Through two events, she leads the competition with 2,251 points. Bogdanova is second with 2,165, followed by Blonska 2,132 and Wheeler 2,117.
Friday evening here, Fountain will compete in the shot put and the 200 meters. Saturday she’ll finish the event with the long jump, the javelin and the 800 meters.
“It’s a decent start but she left some points on the board,” said Lynn Smith, her personal coach and the women’s track coach at Central State. “With the hurdles, we just wanted to run it clean and she got a little sloppy at the end. But considering it can be over before you start if you catch a hurdle, it was a good race.”
Smith said in the high jump she’d cleared considerably higher jumps last week in practice.
If he sounds like a coach who has Fountain’s performance dissected down to a single stride, a fraction of an inch, you’re right.
Although as a personal coach he’s not allowed on the track on competition day — he does work with her daily here in Beijing and was with her when the U.S. track and field team trained a week in Dalian — he was still her guiding force Friday.
He gave her a card with a series of prompts to look over to help her focus on the mechanics of each event.
He sat in the front row of seats it the stadium as Fountain competed in the high jump. Between attempts, she’d always come back over to talk.
The past two years Fountain has battled injuries and was overlooked by many. Now she’s back in stride like she was when she was ranked seventh in the world in 2005. In fact, now she appears to be even better and likely headed to an Olympic medal.
The crowd senses it, too.
When Fountain cleared her first-place high jump, she bounced into a kneeling position in the cushioned landing pit, gave an arms-to-the-heavens Rocky pose and the crowd went nuts.
This wasn’t the stuff of underdogs.
This was the treatment crowds save for winners.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment |
Blog: Hyleas Fountain Goes International
MUTIANYU, China — Call it the perfect storm — a couple of hours of monsoon-like rains that could have rivaled Niagara Falls, crackling lightning and dynamite-blast thunder that sent panicked people running for cover — because I ended up in a tea house at the base of the Great Wall of China, sitting next to the newly formed, Swedish-based Hyleas Fountain Fan Club.
When I say newly formed, I mean as we were sitting there Thursday surrounded by jade jewelry, red Beijing carved lacquer ware and rich-smelling sandalwood fans.
That’s when the five men — Erik Abrahamsson, Jens Boang, Suerker Arver, Anders Hellgren and Tom Aberg — said they would be pulling for Fountain, the U.S. Olympic heptathlete from Kettering, who begins her grueling two-day, seven-event competition here Friday morning (late Thursday night back in Ohio).
Talk about an encapsulating moment.
Greater Dayton athlete, Chinese setting, Swedish support.
Welcome to the Olympics.
Here’s how it all happened.
I’d spent part of Thursday morning exploring — quite strenuously at times — some of the the spectacular stretches of the sixth-century Mutianyu section of the Wall 60 miles from Beijing, then retreated to the tea house where I had green tea and chips.
After awhile the five wet Swedes sat down next to me and soon we were talking. They’re child psychologists/psychiatrists from Ostersund in the northern part of Sweden. They’re also longtime friends who cross-country ski together.
And Aberg actually spent a year as an exchange-student and soccer-style placekicker at Rensselaer High in Indiana — a rarity in the mid-1960s in prep football.
Now all five are here at the Olympic Games.
A good while ago, when it was time to apply for tickets to the Beijing events, it was a simple choice for them.
One pick certainly would be Sweden’s Carolina Kluft, the defending Olympic gold medalist and three-time world champ.
They applied for and got those heptathlon seats. Soon after, Kluft surprised everyone and announced she’s not competing in the event at these Games. She felt she’d be more inspired doing something else and now will try the triple jump and long jump.
“We wondered maybe if they have a place where you can exchange tickets you have for something else?” Abrahamsson said.
I didn’t think there was and then I told him about Fountain, how she’d blown away the competition at the U.S. Olympic Trials and now is a medal contender, along with two Brits.
They were interested now, but I forgot to tell them how Fountain — who came to the Dayton area out of the University of Georgia a couple of years ago to work with Central State women’s track coach Lynn Smith — took a blue-collar approach to these Games.
She worked in the garden department of The Home Depot store off Wilmington Pike and trained at Fairmont High, Central State and the University of Cincinnati, wherever she could get a little side space as the schools’ teams were working out.
But getting to all that wasn’t necessary when Abrahamsson said, “Well, good, that’s gives us someone to pull for.”
So could I call them The Hyleas Fountain Fan Club?
Abrahamsson laughed: “Yes, I think so.”
When the rains stopped, we both headed out.
We were leaving the wondrous Wall, a totem to the back-breaking work of the men — over a million it’s estimated — who built it, and we were headed off to see one of the hardest-working women athletes in these Olympic Games.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment |
Blog: Is Michael Phelps the Greatest Olympian Ever?
BEIJING — Fellow gold medal swimmer Aaron Piersol perfectly summed up Michael Phelps’ performance so far here at the Beijing Olympics the other day when when he said, “Something like this happens once in a century.”
Certainly 100 years from now, these will be remembered as the Michael Phelps Games.
He’s already won five gold medals in world record times and has three events left. Wednesday — with world record-breaking wins in the 200-meter butterfly and 800 freestyle relay — he upped his career Olympic gold medal total to 11.
The old Summer Games mark was nine — held by Carl Lewis, Paavo Nurmi, Larissa Latynina and Mark Spitz, whose seven-golds-in-one-Games record Phelps is about to blow away, too.
The question now floating around here is: Is Phelps the greatest Olympian ever?
Other candidates that come to mind are Jesse Owens and Jim Thorpe and Lewis, but what Phelps is doing here in Beijing is the most ambitious undertaking in the history of the Games.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment |
BLOG: A Name That Has A Ring — five of them — To It
BEIJING — By now, you must know just how over the moon the Chinese people are about the Olympic Games, their Olympic heros and the way these Games make them feel proud and special.
You saw that Sunday night in the China-USA men’s basketball game when Yao Ming — 7-foot-6 Yao Ming — promptly opened the game with a long three-pointer. The place went crazy — 18,000 people in the sold-out arena, 18,000 camera flashes. It was like that all night.
I have seen some variation of that at every venue and at various places all around the city, but the point really was brought home at the Opening Ceremonies Friday night when I heard about Hu Yilel and his six-year-old son Aoyan outside the Bird’s Nest.
A European photographer told me how had stumbled across the father taking a picture of his boy with the Olympic rings as a back drop and how he had been very proud to explain the significance of that moment.
Turns out Aoyan is short for Olympics Games. In 2001, soon after the Chinese won the bid to host the games, Hu and his wife learned they were going to have a child and wanted to connect the two glorious moments.
I’ve found out now the Hus weren’t the only people thinking this way. Not long ago Agence France-Presse reported 4,104 children have the name Aoyan. More than 90 percent of them are boys.
There are all kinds of other Olympics-related names that have ended up on kids as the Chinese people want to forever link themselves to a moment that truly resonates in their lives.
Yet I think my favorite name comes from Zimbabwe. I don’t know what life moment prompted this one, but one guy — according to The New York Times — named his son Never Trust a Woman.
Think the kid’s going to like that one when he turns 16?
Permalink | Comments (27) | Post your comment |
Blog: Reactions to a Murdered American
With head coach Hugh McCutcheon gone to take care of his family after his father-in-law was murdered and his mother-in-law severely injured in a knife attack Saturday in Beijing, the U.S men’s Olympic volleyball team banded together as best it could Sunday and debuted against Venezuela at Capital Gymnasium.
Todd Bachman was killed by a 47-year-old Chinese man while touring the 13th Century Drum Tower early Saturday afternoon. His wife, Barbara, suffered life-threatening injuries and underwent eight hours of surgery. According to U.S. press attache Darryl Seibel, she is in critical but stable condition at Peking University Medical College Hospital. The Chinese woman giving the Bachmans their tour was severely injured, as well, and remains hospitalized.
Elisabeth “Wiz” Bachman McCutcheon — a member of the 2004 U.S. women’s Olympic team — was with her parents when they were attacked, but was unharmed.
The assailant — Tang Yongming — then jumped to his death from the 130-foot second-floor balcony of the ancient tower.
McCutcheon was practicing with his team at Beijing Normal when he got word of the attack and left immediately. He did talk to his players by speaker phone once they returned to the Athletes’ Village Saturday night.
According to Rob Browning, team leader of the men’s volleyball team, McCutcheon is not sure if or when he will be able to return to coach the team.
Before Sunday’s competition, Browning read a brief statement to the few media at the game. He expressed the team’s support of the McCutcheon and Bachman families, but admitted, “We are absolutely devastated by what has occurred, for their loss and for everything they are going through. … We are a family and we will get through this as a family.”
Browning said postponing the Venezuelan match was never considered.
Saturday night — many members of the U.S. women’s team, several of them Wiz’s former teammates — were in tears before, during and after their Olympic opener against Japan, which they won, 3-1.
Wiz’s 62-year-old father — chief executive officer for Bachman’s, Inc., a home-and-garden center based in Minneapolis — was well known to many of the women’s players.
“God, we all love Wiz,” a tearful Logan Tom told reporters after the match. “It’s hard to put it in words. That’s not something that’s supposed to happen.”
She then began to cry and excused herself.
In the lead-up to the Games, Chinese officials had put extreme security measures in place to quell any problems. A 100,000-strong security force plus countless volunteer guards have been deployed to protect against any trouble. Concerns were aimed mainly at protest groups or terrorist attempts, not street crime, which is rare here compared to Dayton and other U.S. cities.
Chinese are not permitted to own guns and punishments of crime against foreign visitors are more severe than they are for transgressions against locals.
After the attack, police blocked off streets leading to the Drum Tower, cordoning off the area with yellow crime scene tape.
Tang is said to have been a factory worker from the eastern city of Hangzhou and had no criminal record. He divorced and moved out of his family home in 2006 and arrived in Beijing on August 1 this year. No motive for the attack was known.
“For all intents, it appears to be a random attack by a deranged man,” Jim Easton, an American member of the International Olympic Committee, told The Associated Press. “The only thing we’ve heard is they were not identifiable except for a small volleyball pin which would probably be invisible to a guy.
“Here it is supposed to be a great time of happiness and peace and all that. That’s what we work hard for, then for one person to be able to put a dark cloud on that.”
Embassy spokeswoman Susan Stevenson said: “We don’t believe this was targeted at American citizens, and we don’t believe this has anything to do with the Olympics.”
An initial investigations by Interpol found nothing indicating the murder was linked to terrorism or organized crime.
“So far, our database check and preliminary analysis suggest that today’s murder-suicide was an isolated, though brutal, murder of one person and assault on two others,” said Interpol Secretary General Ronald K. Noble.
In a statement released by the U.S. Olympic Committee, its chairman, Peter Ueberroth, spoke for the entire American contingent here when he said:
“It is impossible to describe the depth of our sadness and shock in this tragic hour. Our delegation comes to the games as a family, and when one member of our family suffers a loss, we all grieve with them.”
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment |
Blog: Feeling the Heat at Opening Ceremonies
BEIJING — We’re an hour into the Opening Ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games. I’m sitting in the upper deck of the aesthetically wondrous, but poor ventilated Bird’s Next Stadium — alongside similarly drenched Mexican, French and Mongolian writers — and we’re all melting.
The roof is partially open, the soupy night has come in and, well, the only thing I can compare it to is that hot box the jockeys at River Downs sit in when they need to sweat off five or six pounds right before a race.
It’s brutal — puddles on my computer keyboard, no lie — but I figure a breeze will kick in sometime and as the show continues to unfold down on the arena floor, where the Chinese are putting on the best opening spectacle I’ve seen in the 12 Games I’ve covered, we’ll forget the heat.
But I think the thermostat will turn up a little on the Chinese government officials here in their private box when the Parade of Athletes begins and the U.S. team is led in by flag bearer Lopez Lomong, the 1,500-meter runner who was one of the Lost Boys of Sudan.
He’s exactly what China didn’t want put on stage here. The country is under fire for its compliance with a Sudanese government that’s backing genocide in Darfur.
China buys two-thirds of Sudan’s oil, so it’s a big financial backer. It also sells arms to the country in violation of a UN ban. Those weapons end up in the hand of militia goons — Janjaweed they’re called — and they are responsible for hundreds of thousands of killings and deadly starvations. They kidnap kids, rape little girls, enslave them and kill them. The boys are either turned into soldiers or they often die, too.
As my story will tell you in Saturday’s paper — we spent an hour with him Friday — Lomong escaped from the Janjaweed clutches, ended up in a Kenyan refugee camp for a decade and finally came to the U.S., thanks to Catholic relief workers and an upstate New York family who became his foster parents.
Now he’ll march into this stadium with a unbelievable back story that encapsulates everything people are criticizing China about.
The Chinese brass are so thin skinned, they denied visas to some athletes — including U.S. gold medal speedskater Joey Cheek — because as Team Darfur members, they have been vocal about what is happening in Sudan.
I hope the Chinese people have a glorious night tonight — so far they have been gracious hosts, giddily enthusiastic and so very proud — but if some of their government officials feel uncomfortable when Lomong marches out — well, good.
They should.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Post your comment |
Blog: Going the Extra Mile For An Autograph
BEIJING — Here’s how caught up some Chinese people are in the Olympics.
Thirteen-year-old Lu Zhiyuan and his dad came to Beijing from Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province. That’s 1,000 miles and they did it on bicycle.
And for the past six days, Lu has been camped out at the Beijing airport getting autographs from arriving Olympic athletes. By Thursday he was said to have 300, including tennis star Rafael Nadal — who happened to be on my flight to Beijing — and basketball player Yi Jianlian.
Lu — who shows up at the airport with his father at 11 a.m. every day and waits for athletes until 7 p.m. — told a local newspaperman here he still was waiting for one prized autograph — Kobe Bryant’s.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment |
Blog: Four U.S. Athletes in a Flap
BEIJING — Well, we’ve got our first flap involving American athletes here.
Four U.S. track cyclists — Sarah Hammer, Jennie Reed, Bobby Lea and Mike Friedman — got off their flight at the Beijing airport wearing pollution masks and walked straight into controversy.
Photographers and TV crews filmed the quartet as they made their way through the new terminal and instantly those images were all over the internet and soon on TV.
Some people here took that as a slap at the host country. U.S.O.C. officials seemed to agree, so Wednesday the four sent a formal apology to Chinese Olympic organizers, though they claimed their actions were done for health concerns and “(were) in no way meant to serve as an environmental or political statement” and were not meant to insult their Chinese hosts.
“We deeply regret the nature of our choices,” the statement said.
There are reports that two of the cyclists even wore their masks in the plane on the flight over to China. I’m wondering if they were concerned about the air there, too, or were they looking for some attention or was this simply a matter of being obtuse?
The masks — issued by the USOC — were given to about one-third of the 596 American athletes who will compete here. But they weren’t necessarily meant to be worn the second the athletes set foot on Chinese soil.
“It wasn’t the best judgment at the time, and the athletes understand that now,” said USOC chief executive Jim Scherr. “We believe that this will be, hopefully, the last incident of this kind. We’re making sure the athletes understand how their actions are perceived by the host country.”
For years here, Chinese people here have worn masks to protect their lungs from the dust and pollution.
But, right or wrong, there’s a different standard for foreign athletes at the Games. Outsiders wearing masks when their actions will be viewed world-wide is interpreted as a loss of face by many locals.
“When you’re walking around with a mask on, you’re basically saying, ‘You guys stink,’ ” Scott Schnitzspahn, performance director of the U.S. triathlon team, told the Wall Street Journal.
That said, several U.S. teams are staying out of Beijing until the last minute, in part because of concerns about the air quality, which, as has been well documented, on bad days here is some of the worst in the world.
The canoe and kayak teams are still training in Komatsu, Japan. The track team is in Dalian on the Chinese coast, and the swimmers — who begin their competitions Saturday — just got here from Singapore.
Wednesday at a press conference, Dara Torres and Michael Phelps — the headliners on the U.S. swim team — praised the Olympic effort by their hosts and Phelps insisted he has no concerns about the air here and had had none in his other competitive visits here in the past.
Still it will be interesting to see how many athletes march in the opening ceremony Friday night — a commitment that means standing outside for several hours straight. More interestingly, will any wears masks in front of the TV cameras that will beam their images to billions of people around the globe?
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment |
Blog: In China with Roy the Boy
BEIJING — I had only been talking to Wu Kun a few minutes the other day when he said, “You can call me Roy.”
I was in a lunch room at the media village where I’m staying here in Beijing and one of the young women who works there introduced herself as “Angelina … like in Jolie.”
At the shop where I bought a phone card the other day, a girl was Britney. I guess like in Spears.
Lots of younger people take new Western names, Angelina said, and in J. Maarten Troost’s “Lost On Planet China,” he offered an explanation for the trend:
“People in China choose Western names because there are so few Chinese names … Everything is magnified by the sheer number of Chinese. Li, Wang and Zhang are the most common names.
“There are 88 million people in China named Zhang. There are more people called Chen in China than there are Canadians in Canada.”
Part of it also may be Chinese people making it easier for Westerners to say and remember their names.
And so how do they pick those new names?
Wu laughed: “My friends gave me a list of names to pick from and I liked Roy. It rhymes with boy. I’m Roy the Boy. And the Portland Trail Blazers have a great guard named Roy.”
He was talking about Brandon Roy.
I’m glad Roy follows the NBA and not auto racing.
There can be only one Dick Trickle.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment |
Blog: Sexually Inexperienced Chicken … and Other Matters.
BEIJING — After being up about 36 hours straight — traveling to China, getting set up at Main Press Center here at the Beijing Games and getting lost on a what turned out to be an interesting walk Monday night — I finally got some sleep.
I’m staying at the North Star Media Village, which is a collection of 16 high-rise buildings housing 6,000 media from around the world — or about 30 percent of the press corps here.
Like villages from other Games, North Star has its assortment of cafeterias, a bar, some newsstands and some other amenities. But I did notice one thing different on my walk to the bus stop this morning.
In the village is what I thought was a makeshift fire station. It’s a tent-like building in which two red trucks are parked at the ready. I noticed the two firemen standing at rigid attention out front in the already sauna-like heat and thought, ‘Man, these guys have it a lot tougher than the guys I see every day at the fire station at Warren and Buckeye I pass every day back in Dayton.’
Then a closer look revealed what appears to be a missile mounted on top of one truck. “Maybe security,” a Games press officer told me with a shrug. “There’ll be a lot of big shots at the opening ceremony.”
And there is plenty of security here. Olive-clad soldiers stand at attention along many of the streets and especially around all the Olympic venues and iconic Beijing stops like Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. There are blue uniformed police, too, and in Tiananmen Square on Tuesday afternoon, I noticed some undercover cops — you often can tell them by their government-issue black shoes.
And yet the security presence doesn’t seem stifling — yet.
Maybe because there’s so much else to see and figure out here. When you don’t know the language, the mores, or many of the intricacies of a culture some 3,000 years in the making, you just wade in with your eyes open and your questions handy.
For instance, there’s a store &— sort of a Chinese version of Wal-Mart — right across from the Village where I’m staying. That’s where they sell Jackie Chan Anti-Falling Shampoo. I’m still not sure if it’s for dandruff or guys losing their hair.
Here are some other things you might not have been sure of until an American instructor at Beijing International Studies University recently teamed with a local Chinese professor to clear up some Chinese-to-English translations on signs, menus and the like around the city.
And so the Donga Anus Hospital became the Donga Proctology Hospital.
Then there was the menu item listed as “saliva chicken.” It meant tasty, mouth-watering chicken. At another place a hog dog was listed as “warm canine.” Of course there are places that serve real dog here, though local Olympic organizers have tried to pressure establishments into taking that item off the menu until after the Games.
And there was the place that served pullets, which are hens less than a year old. That came out on some menus as “Sexually Inexperienced Chicken.”
There was one thing that needed no translation Monday night as a St. Louis writer and I left a shopping center an hour’s walk from the Media Center.
As we headed to the sidewalk, a young woman dressed in a black sun dress came up and whispered “Massage?”
As a menu item, I’m guessing she would not be listed as “Sexually Inexperienced.”
