Posts from — April 2008

Who will emerge as the overall champion in the Beijing Olympics? According to Luciano Barra, the United States will retain its title while China will land in second place.

His projection, issued last December 2007, is as follows:

1. United States: 98 medals (47 gold)
2. China: 89 medals (38 gold)
3. Russia: 88 medals (32 gold)

Barra, an Olympic official from Italy, earlier predicted that China will top the gold medal race (China, 45; U.S., 41; and Russia, 34) but he revised his projection and came up with the one above.

Anyways, how did this Barra guy arrive at his numbers? It’s no rocket science, my friend, what he did pala is to look at the results in the most recent world championships. If there’s no world championships for a particular sport, he looked at the equivalent event for that sport.

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If Iraq’s Dana Abdul-Razzaq has a fan club out there, please send us an invite so we will join you. We like it when athletes defy “religious leaders”.

Dana is the first Iraqi woman to represent her country in the Olympics; she will compete in the 100m and 200m events in Beijing.

Watch the video if you’re into cute and furry animals who are “well mannered, healthy, and easygoing”.

Our quote for the day comes from Li Jiawei and it goes like this:

“Does he want to affect my chances of winning a medal or my moods? What is his motive and why now? I am a girl after all and he knows these things will upset me.”

If you’re like, “Dude, who is Li? And who is ‘he’?”, here’s a short version of their story (you can read the more detailed version here) :

* Li is the team captain of Singapore’s table tennis team and “he” is Ronald Susilo, a national badminton player also from Singapore. They are reportedly Singapore’s best hopes for an Olympic medal.

* The two were engaged but then eventually broke up.

* After their separation, Susilo told The Sunday Times that he was mulling legal action to recover money he claimed to have put into their car and apartment.

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Let’s file this under the “We’ve never heard of that” category. Seriously, this is our first time to hear that three equestrian gold medalists in Athens 2004 were stripped of their medals because their horses didn’t pass doping tests.

So we’re like, “What? They test horses for drugs too?” Apparently they do. Here’s an excerpt from an AP report:

The international equestrian federation (Fédération Equestre Internationale, FEI) is stepping up the fight against medication use in equine athletes to avoid a repeat of the situation following the 2004 Athens Olympics.

“Athens was really a bad moment for the sport,” FEI spokeswoman Malina Gueorguiev told The Associated Press on Friday. “It was a big problem and it was very spectacular. Should anything like that happen again it could be very detrimental for the sport.”

In case you are wondering, these are the athletes/teams who lost their medals:
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