Category — United States

Will the IOC strip American Michael Phelps of his six Olympic gold medals now that we have proof that he is, in fact, a merman?

Very unlikely. The above photos are actually part of Annie Leibovitz’s “Disney Dream Portrait Series”. For these “The Little Mermaid” portraits, Julian Moore is Ariel to Michael’s merman.

So what does Annie think of our Olympic champ? “His movements were so graceful and beautiful you just felt like you were watching a real merman,” she says.

Will Phelps’ “merman like” movement help him achieve his goal of bagging eight gold medals in Beijing? If he does, we will have to crown him as the swimming GOAT (greatest of all time).

Check out Michael’s official site.

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Remember Luciano Barra? In case you forgot about him already, Luciano is the Italian sports official who predicted that the United States will retain its overall championship crown during the Beijing Olympiad. In fact he crunched out the numbers for the top three nations: United States: 98 medals (47 gold); China: 89 medals (38 gold); and Russia: 88 medals (32 gold).

As we noted here, Barra based his projection on the performance of athletes in international competitions.

Anyhow, while we are in this Olympic crystal ball-gazing mode, here’s the take of a Filipino writer named Manolo Inigo who believes that China looms “as the heavy favorite to rule the 29th Olympic Games in Beijing”.

He thinks that China can win a) because of its crowd support advantage and b) because it consistently made “big strides in past Olympics”.

I’m not sure if those are good enough predictors but let’s see how China’s medal haul improved from the 1988 Seoul Olympics to the 2004 Athen Games:
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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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