“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.

* Li was “very troubled” by the allegation that she owed Susilo money, hence her statement above.

* Singaporean officials are now worried that this spat between the ex-lovers may well cost the city-state a medal in the Olympics.

Ahh, love gone wrong, they affect our Olympian idols too. Now, is it me or is Susilo a bit ungentlemanly for the way he handled this situation?

Nothing wrong with trying to recover money but it seems like he blabbed to the press before he discussed the matter with his ex? Kinda ill-advised if you ask us. But what do you think?

Now, the good folks at the Lingnan University in Hongkong obviously disagree with my mom (re: the usefulness of such study) so they set out to do an “econometric analysis of the Olympic Games“. They whipped out their calculators, pored over Olympic medal records, examined the different countries’ material wealth, did their statistical analysis thing, and came up with the following conclusion:

The results of the study show that population and income do indeed have a substantial effect on the number of Olympic medals won.

There’s really no need to translate that but we will “translate” it anyways because we want to, here it goes: “Richer countries with more people win more Olympic medals.”

So maybe my mom only got it half right. Not all rich countries win more medals. They also have to have more human resources, i.e., athletes, competing for them.

By the way, the really interesting part of the study as far as The Olympian Blog is concerned are the following medal predictions:

* that China will increase its medal haul by 14% in the 2008 Beijing Olympics but it will remain in second place behind the United States

* that Japan and South Korea will have fewer medals compared to their medal harvest in the 2004 Olympic Games

This is interesting because we will soon see in August if the Lingnan U folks got it right. We’ll keep you posted.