From Newsweek:

Cuba’s Angel Matos deliberately kicked a referee square in the face after he was disqualified in a bronze-medal match, prompting the World Taekwondo Federation to recommend he be banned for life.

“We didn’t expect anything like what you have witnessed to occur,” said WTF secretary general Yang Jin-suk. “I am at a loss for words.”

Yang also recommended Matos’ coach be banned.

Matos was winning 3-2, with 1:02 left in the second round, when he fell to the mat after being hit by his opponent, Kazakhstan’s Arman Chilmanov. Matos was sitting there, awaiting medical attention, when he was disqualified for taking too much injury time. Fighters get one minute, and Matos was disqualified when his time ran out.

Matos angrily questioned the call, pushed a judge, then pushed and kicked referee Chakir Chelbat of Sweden, who will require stitches in his lip. Matos spat on the floor and was escorted out.

“This is an insult to the Olympic vision, an insult to the spirit of taekwondo and, in my opinion, an insult to mankind,” Yang said.

From CNBC:

Despite the disappointment of one of their biggest endorsers, Nike will salute hurt Chinese hurdler Liu Xiang tomorrow — instead of hoping that he’ll disappear.

This is the type of thing that makes Nike a leader in sports marketing. When the other sponsors privately cringe at the thought of one of their top guys going down, the folks at the Swoosh actually think, “How do we spend on this and turn it into a great human moment that appeals to people?”

The print ad, which will appear in The China Daily and a few local papers here in Beijing, will have Liu Xiang’s face and will contain the following copy (in Mandarin):

Love competition.
Love risking your pride.
Love winning it back.
Love giving it everything you’ve got.
Love the glory. Love the pain.
Love sport even when it breaks your heart.
Just Do It.

I believe that this is a good move on the part of Nike as there appears to be more public sympathy than public irritation/condemnation for Liu’s failure to defend his title. In fact, maybe Nike may have hit on a winning marketing formula. Who among you will agree with me that the “sympathy card” will sell more shoes than the “hero-worship” card?

Related posts:
Youtube Video: Liu Xiang’s Non-Run in Beijing 2008
Liu Xiang Quits
Liu Xiang: Large Shoes, Big ….

Barcelona was, for many of us Olympic virgins, as much about sex as it was about sport. There were the gorgeous hostesses – there to assist the athletes – in their bright yellow shirts and black skirts; there were the indigenous lovelies who came to watch the competitions. And then there were the female athletes – literally thousands of them – strutting, shimmying, sashaying and jogging around the village, clad in Lycra and exposing yard upon yard of shiny, toned, rippling and unimaginably exotic flesh. Women from all the countries of the world: muscular, virile, athletic and oozing oestrogen. I spent so much time in a state of lust that I could have passed out. Indeed, for all I knew I did pass out – in a place like that how was one to tell the difference between dreamland and reality?

It was not just the guys. The women, too, seemed in thrall to their hormones, throwing around daring glances and dynamite smiles like confetti. No meal or coffee break was complete without a breathless conversation with a lithe long jumper from Cuba or an Amazonian badminton player from Sweden, the mutual longing so evident it was almost comical. It was an effort of will to keep everything in check until competition had finished. But, once we were eliminated from our respective competitions, we lunged at each other like suicidal fencers. There may have been a fair amount of gay sex going on, too – but given the notorious homophobia in sport it was rather more covert.

This sex fest was not limited to Barcelona: the same thing happened in Sydney in 2000, my second Olympics as an athlete, and is happening right here in Beijing, where this time I’m a commentator. I spoke to an Aussie table tennis player this week to check out the village vibe and he launched into the breathless patter common to any Olympic debutant: “It is unbelievable in there; everyone is totally crazy once they are out of their competitions. God knows what it is going to be like this weekend. It is like a world within a world.” A British runner (anonymous again: athletes are not supposed to talk to journalists unaccompanied by a PR type, least of all about sex) said: “The swimmers finished earlier in the week and it was like there was an eruption.”

Ah yes, the swimmers. For some reason the International Olympic Committee insists on bunching the swimming events towards the beginning of the Games with the inevitable consequence that the aquatics folk get going earlier – sexually I mean – than everyone else. So much so that, at the outset of the Sydney Olympics, Jonathan Edwards, a Christian and triple jumper extraordinaire, caused a ripple by telling them publicly to keep a lid on it.

Edwards was simply concerned about getting woken up by creaking floorboards, but given his biblical credentials, it became a story about morality. Not that his intervention made a blind bit of difference.

There is a famous story from Seoul in 1988 that there were so many used condoms on the roof terrace of the British team’s residential block the night after the swimming concluded that the British Olympic Association sent out an edict banning outdoor sex. Here in Beijing, organisers have realised that such prohibitions are about as useful as banning breathing and have, instead, handed out thousands of free condoms to the athletes. If you can’t stop ‘em, at least make it safe.

Read the rest here. Not that they will need it but, in case you don’t know, athletes can use Viagra during the Olympics without fear that they will be accused of using performance-enhancing drugs.

It would have been great to see him run despite whatever injury he sustained. After all, isn’t that what the Olympics is about — overcoming all odds and that kind of stuff? But, then again, maybe its unfair to expect him to risk his health and future well-being if only because his fans want to see him running. I’m sure his other fans also have mixed feelings about this.

What would be interesting to see in the future would be the impact, if any, of Liu’s decision to quit. Will Nike, for instance, still produce its Air Liu? Or will they find someone who will be a better fit for their expensive shoes? [It's expensive not because it is expensive to produce but because of the ridiculous fees they give to the stars who wear them.]

Update: The video of Liu Xiang in the 110 meter hurdles is here.

Update II: Nike continues to feature Liu Xiang in its ad campaign, details here.

Related posts:
Hurdles: Dayron Robles vs. Liu Xiang II
Hurdles: Dayron Robles vs. Liu Xiang
Photo of the Day: Liu Xiang
Photo of the Day: Liu Xiang
Liu Xiang: Large Shoes, Big ….

Photo source: xinhuanet

AP via Huffington Post: The U.S. track and field team’s protest of the women’s 100-meter final at the Olympics was rejected Sunday night.

The Americans asked that the race be reviewed because of a possible false start by Torri Edwards, one of the country’s sprinters.

Edwards herself said she thought she false-started. She wound up finishing last as Shelly-Ann Fraser led a Jamaican sweep of medals in the dash.

Let us get this straight. So Torri Edwards may have made a false start — which should give her an advantage because she started before everybody else — yet still lost. And now the Americans wanted to invalidate the results because Edwards may have made a false start?

I understand the urge to complain because you were disadvantaged. But complaining about the results because you had an unfair advantage? That’s one for the books. I wonder if Torri Edwards would go out broadcasting to the world that she may have made a false start, and ask that the race be reviewed, if she won this event and didn’t end up dead last.

Related: American Crybabies

I’m sure we all agree that Jon is a genius. We should give him a gold medal already.

Related:
Spain’s Olympic Basketball Team: Racists or Just Foolish Dudes?
American Crybabies

Swedish wrestler Ara Abrahamian threw down his Olympic bronze medal in protest on Thursday after his bid for greco-roman gold was ended by a decision denounced by the Swedish coach as “politics”.

Abrahamian took the bronze from around his neck during the medal ceremony, stepped from the podium and dropped it in the middle of the wrestling mat then walked off.

“I don’t care about this medal. I wanted gold,” he said.

I don’t know whether or not to feel bad for Ara but I do know that he has created a practice, the art of medal dumping, which this blog will be monitoring in the future. We will be adding it to the art of medal kissing, medal biting, arms waving, and other Olympic traditions.

I say, remove the silly age limits. If an athlete can compete with the rest of them despite their age, then let them compete.

From USA Today: Two female Chinese gymnasts, including a gold medal favorite, might be too young to participate in the Beijing Olympics.

Several online records and reports show He Kexin, the host nation’s top competitor on uneven bars, and Jiang Yuyuan might not be 16, the minimum age for eligibility. Both were chosen for the team last week.

On the website of the Chengdu Sports Bureau — Chengdu is the capital of Sichuan province in southwest China — a file dated January 2006 shows He Kexin as being born Jan. 1, 1994.

Most recently, a May 23 story in the China Daily newspaper, the official English-language paper of the Chinese government, had He’s age as 14.

The New York Times raised questions about the athletes’ ages in a story Saturday. And Chinese officials provided the newspaper with copies of passports indicating both gymnasts are 16.

The Times reported International Gymnastics Federation officials acknowledged questions about He’s age had been raised. “We heard these rumors, and we immediately wrote to the Chinese gymnastics federation,” Andre Gueisbuhler, the secretary general of the international federation, told the newspaper. “They immediately sent a copy of the passport, showing the age, and everything is OK. That’s all we can check.”

Beijing authorities are secretly planning to ban black people and others it considers social undesirables from entering the city’s bars during the Olympic Games, a move that would contradict the official slogan, “One World, One Dream”.

Bar owners near the Workers’ Stadium in central Beijing say they have been forced by Public Security Bureau officials to sign pledges agreeing not to let black people enter their premises.

“Uniformed Public Security Bureau officers came into the bar recently and told me not to serve black people or Mongolians,” said the co-owner of a western-style bar, who asked not to be named.

The local authorities have been cracking down on blacks and Mongolians in an attempt to stamp out drug dealing and prostitution ahead of the Games, the proprietors said.

What is most likely happening is that authorities are cracking down on drug dealing and prostitution. Because there is nothing wrong with that, Tom Miller decides to make it a race issue. Tommy boy must be chuckling somewhere very pleased with himself.

Read Beijing Boyce’s take on the matter.

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Pistorius vs Weiss: Oscar Mulls Legal Action
Pistorius Saga: The Wise Words of Pierre Weiss

Photo source: AP