With just two days to go until the Opening Ceremonies, I’m like a kid on Christmas Eve. Despite all the drug scandals and terrorist threats, these Olympics are still quickening my pulse. Here are some stories I’m watching:
- Canada’s Perdita Felicien (PDF) looks like a good bet for a medal, hopefully gold. I just heard today that her main competition in the hurdles, American Gail Devers, will be taking the place of Torri Edwards in the 100m. This bodes well since Devers will be competing in two high-pressure events, while Perdita can just focus on the hurdles.
- American 1500m runner Carrie Tollefson has had an interesting journey to the Olympics. Although she won the US trials in July, she hadn’t reached either of the Olympic standards (“A” or “B”) and was in jeopardy of losing her place on the team. She had until August 9 to make the standards, and along with other hopefuls Amy Rudolph and Jen Toomey, she’d been running a flurry of races in Europe over the past few weeks in an attempt to qualify. She made the “B” standard just a few days ago and due to some other permutations, she’ll be the sole US runner in her event. I’ve been following her career for a while now, probably because she’s tall and blonde and beautiful, but she’ll have her work cut out even trying to reach the final against the powerful Russian women. She’s only ranked 39th in the world. (Her selection to the team also dashed the hopes of Suzy Favor Hamilton, who suffered a panic attack while leading the race in the Sydney Olympics and crashed to the track. These would have been her last Olympics.)
- Still on the 1500m, Canada’s own Carmen Douma-Hussar (PDF) has been getting precious little attention, even though she’s ranked a very respectable 12th and was the silver medallist at the 2004 World Indoor Championships. Along with Malindi Elmore (PDF) (16th), she’s showing the world that Canada’s women are very strong contenders at this distance.
- Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj has dominated the 1500m distance for years, but has never won an Olympic gold medal (he won the silver in Sydney). In the runup to this year’s Olympic competition, he’s been beaten several times, finishing a remarkable 8th in one race. After getting treatment for allergies, he’s started returning to form, but will he be able to hold off Kenyan Bernard Lagat (bronze in Sydney)? And what about rising American star Alan Webb?
- In the men’s 10,000m event, Ethiopia seems to have it all sewn up. But the interesting story is whether it will be veteran Haile Gebreselassie (perhaps the greatest distance runner in history) or young up-and-comer Kenenisa Bekele who prevails. This will probably be Gebreselassie’s last Olympics running this distance; he’s stated that he will probably begin running marathons very soon.
As you can tell, I tend to focus my attention on the track. Despite the fact that even more athletes will undoubtedly fail drug tests in Athens, I’m hoping for an exciting and competitive Games.
I’ll probably be posting more here during the Games. But also keep your eye on Runner-Up for stories that won’t make the front pages of the newspapers.
The suggestion has been put out there that all attempts to control the performance enhancing drug use should be nixed and let the athletes duke it out using whatever method they choose. Your thoughts?
Well, I’m against that idea, though I can see the reasoning behind it. Mainly, I don’t like that because it lets the athlete/team/country with the most money/scientific know-how win, rather than just who has the talent and who trains the hardest.
There were two interesting documentaries on CBC this week about doping in sport. In one of them, a group of volunteers were injected with steroids and competed in a “mini-games” competition to see if the steroids had any positive effect. As expected, in the sprint and strength events, these guys made remarkable gains in just a few weeks.
So, it’s clear that the drugs “work” but unless they were free, it still places a barrier in front of athletes from poorer countries. Not to mention that in the past (and perhaps even now), some countries forced their athletes to take performance-enhancing drugs (ie. East Germany), which is just gruesome.
The other documentary hinted at even more grotesque forms of doping, including “gene therapy.” If we just give up, pretty soon we’ll just be breeding people to win medals, which takes any humanity and sense of “struggle” out of sport entirely.
Already baseball is starting to lose a lot of its appeal for this reason. I mean, is the number of home runs you hit the only measure of a good baseball player, or even of a good game? As a society, we’ve become fixated on instant gratification and bigger and better at all costs. Crazy!
Good thought-provoking question, though. Anyone else have any ideas?
Let’s just hope they can fill all those empty seats. The greeks don’t seem too eager to fill the gapping expanses of empty seats.