Following Newcastle United chairman Mike Ashley’s Ashburton Grove appearance in the Toon end with pint in hand, the Football Supporters’ Federation is looking for any fans ejected and/or prosecuted for drinking in sight of the pitch this past weekend to come forward.

Why should the law abiding majority of football fans be singled out? If you’ve been ejected, banned or prosecuted for drinking in sight of the pitch, particularly this past weekend, get in touch with the FSF NOW at: info @ fsf.org.uk or on 08702 777777 (Mon-Fri office hours).

And yet. I feel like there has been more Olympics around. Clearly this is the problem of success, the news clogs up with Super Saturday, Super Sunday and other days where the word super is less alliterative. We managed to annoy the Australians by being better than them (despite lacking the moral high ground of having a smaller population). The Australians manage to annoy us by saying that all our medals were in sports where we get to sit down and are almost correct. Everyone is nice about the Chinese and ignores their human rights violations much like you pretend to have fun at your racists grandfathers 80th party. We worried about Boris Johnson being a knob. Somethings at least don’t change. But with the spotlight now falling on London 2012, that is a whole new level of avoidance. It strikes me that this fifty one minute record will be impossible in 2012, as the Olympics will be everywhere. Unless I leave London, the next four years it will be impossible to avoid the Olympics. So its a bit of a hollow victory.

Better than failure though, as the UK diving team will tell you.

preamble: the chinese capitalised (er haha) on A: a known gift for fireworks, B: a known gift for people prettily running with flags, C: spectacular oriental spectacle, D: a population as numberless as the pixels in the ocean — and the Brits limp far behind on all counts; my suggestion is that we should make a virtue of necessity and scrobble our counter-spectacle up round the sense of grumpy, lumpy, stubborn, dry-witted, weird-crop SMALLNESS, the aesthetic legacy of a small crowded windy greenfield crag dropped into the north sea

hence my answer:

something else one doesn’t normally associate with ice skaters is clothes you might actually want to wear yourself. but in 2006 russia had it goin on. their motif was a kind of cross between a paisley shape and a garland (or a zapf dingbat), and when applied to a straight-up indie gas-station attendant vibe i found the russian outfits almost as irresistable as a certain ice skater who wore them. (they also had their own twee mascot, the venerable cheburashka, who may have contributed to a new Olympic trend.)

it’s unnecessary to detail the hours i spent trying to track down the hoodie in the above photo. oh i was desperate, had taken leave of my senses. 1/2-inch enamel souvenir pins on ebay with the above garland/paisley design were enough to start me salivating. in the end i forgot about it. but here come the olympics again, taunting me with their inaccessible vestments, reminding me of the ones that got away. it appears that the company which made those russian outfits still have a web site and it’s being revamped. a dormant spark of hope flares up. are you out there, boscosport? do you do trackbacks? i’m an easy mark.

It was not ever thus - take Britain’s performance at the Barcelona Olympics. Five golds, and four of the athletes involved became more or less household names. But the Beijing mob surely won’t fare quite so well: in fact looking at the media you can already see who’s being groomed for future stardom (in the British sense of the word, i.e. a comfy berth on a daytime TV sofa whenever needed).

What is the FAME FORMULA for Olympic success? In the grand tradition of bogus equations I give you this:

F = (A * C)/R

F, clearly, stands for FAME. The level of F determines your later station in life, whether it be beloved sporting ambassador, tut-tutting commentator, or advertising WellMan supplements on the tube.

A stands for ACHIEVEMENT. Winning an medal is an achievement, obviously, but this also includes factors like age, overcoming adversity, winning our first medal in something for a grillion years, losing it completely on the podium, etc.

C stands for CELEBGENICNESS, a complex word for a complex concept, as it encompasses things like future potential, down-to-earthness, audience being able to relate to, audience finding hott, and so on.

Finally, R stands for RUBNESS OF SPORT. This is a technical term involving the sport’s esteem in the eyes of the Great British Public, and the extent to which they can understand what happens in it.

A final factor is that there are only so many ’slots’ available in the public consciousness for any given sport - we can win all the rowing medals we like, for example, but Redgrave and Pinsent have a lock on the Famous Rowers slots for now, even though they don’t actually race any more. This significantly limits the chances of any of the new crop becoming famous (at least after these Olympics, but possibly forever: consider the Famous Ice Skaters slot). There are a lot more slots open to track athletes, comparatively few for field athletes, potentially quite a few for swimmers, and so on.

Looking at our medalists in this games and applying the Fame Formula, the blindingly obvious winner is Rebecca Adlington: massive achievement, high celebgenicness, sport we vaguely care about, and an easy (too bloody easy) angle for non-sporting coverage viz. “likes shoes”. You can already see the media getting very excited and I hope she can handle it (this in itself is yet another angle - the oh now her life will change story). Adlington’s high Fame score will have a detrimental effect on some of our other winners, who fit a similar bubbly, down-to-earth bracket. Even though they’re in different sports, I’m guessing if it wasn’t for Adlington, Nicole Cooke would come out of these Games more famous than she will (except in Wales!).

You can see the media sizing up other athletes too - Rebecca Romero’s performance in two different disciplines is awesome, but the angle on her seems to be “she’s a mentalist”: scarily driven and very obviously different from the rest of us, whereas with the ‘nice’ athletes we can sort of ignore all the punishing training schedules and what they might imply about someone’s personality. This will limit her post-Games fame, which is a pity I think.

Who else? Christine Ohoruogu will get a big push as a Londoner, though the raging arguments on the BBC Sports Blog (and elsewhere) over her missed-tests bans suggest that the route to future fame won’t be that easy. The rowers are doomed, as is the Laser class sailing guy since i. his event is deceitfully named and ii. people have only just got their heads around Ben Ainslie being properly famous. Cycling is an interesting case - enormous medal haul means people will know more about it, so the R score decreases and more slots open up - Wiggins and Hoy will both step up a fame grade.

Then we’re into the “minor medals”, where people will also be a bit hard done by owing to the sheer bulk of GB medals around: ordinarily a couple of silver or bronze medalists push on to future fame, but in Beijing Louis Smith looks the only likely candidate so far, and in the current medal-drunk climate Britain winning a men’s gymnastics medal has been downgraded from “HOLY SHIT” to “only bronze?”. No room either for plucky losers, which is probably a good thing for the future success of British sport but I feel a bit sorry for Tom Daley, who’s turned from glorious hope to pub quiz answer inside of a week. (I don’t feel that sorry though, since he reminds me weirdly of James Harries).

I’m sure that come 2012 even the forgotten names will come flooding back to those of us who only pay attention every four years, but - like seeing what happens to Big Brother contestants - it’s going to be fascinating watching the ebb and flow of medalist fame. At the very least, this bumper crop should mean some vicious battles for commentary slots come 2024.

The figures

There’s no doubt that this was the fastest Olympics ever:

World records set: 25 (in 21/32 events)
Olympic records set: 65 (in 30/32 events)
World records set in the LZR Racer swimsuit: 92%
Gold medals set in the LZR Racer swimsuit: 94% (89% of ALL medals)

Here’s the swimming medals table (no. gold medals shown in brackets):

Well done us!

4th is a brilliant placing for Great Britain - three medals in one games is more than we’ve managed since the 80s, and to have two of them be gold, well, it’s absolutely brilliant. Rebecca Adlington broke a world record older than herself, and has automatically become an inspiration to every club swimmer grinding up and down the pool at 5am every morning.

As well as the medals, we also got a couple of 4th places and one or two swimmers in nearly every final - although you might think that’s not something to be particularly proud of, it shows how competitive we are compared to Sydney and Athens, and will make those swimmers who came in fourth even hungrier for medals next time round. Liam Tancock deserves a special mention for making three finals (backstroke, IM and medley relay), as does Fran Halsall who had a real chance to medal in the 50m free, the 100m free, the medley relay AND both freestyle relays. She looked so gutted after her last race (as well as absolutely exhausted).

Looking to the future - Rebecca and Fran are still teenagers, and at least half of the GB squad had never been to an Olympics before. In front of a home crowd, who knows what can happen in four years’ time? Hey, it took Michael Phelps two Olympics before he won gold…

America v Australia

On the whole, the non-Phelps favourites going into the games (e.g. Katie Hoff, Grant Hackett, Dara Torres) did pretty badly in terms of gold medals. Let’s find out just *how* badly they’ve done - in graphical format! Here’s the American and Australian gold medals since 1988:

Oh dear! The American women and the Australian men barely won anything this year! The Australian men failed to get a gold medal for the first time since 1976 - ouch. Where’s Ian Thorpe when you need him, eh? They were banking on Grant Hackett to deliver in the 1500m freestyle, and he just wasn’t up to the job this time. The American men obviously did pretty well thanks to SuperPhelps, and Stephanie Rice nabbed those vital medley wins to bump up the Australian women’s total from previous years. But we still can’t discount both AUS and USA’s enormous depth of talent. Here’s their total medals won since 1988:

Their overall team performances are still improving overall thanks to the demise of the Eastern European and Russian swimmers - the dip in Athens was mainly due to very strong showings from the Dutch, French and German swimmers. If Britain’s medal tally for the last twenty years was plotted on the same graph it would be lurking right at the bottom. We’ve still got a long way to go.

Tell you what though, the rest of the medals were really spread out - Brazil, Germany, South Korea, Zimbabwe and Tunisia all got golds thanks to sterling individual performances. France and China both got six medals each, and a whole bunch of European countries picked up silvers and bronzes. Swimming success is finally starting to be consistently found away from the American/Australian centres, and that’s got to be good news for anyone watching.

*Apart from the 10km open water races on Wednesday and Thursday of course - tune in and cheer on David Davies, Keri-Ann Payne and Cassie Patten.

So it appears that the “GOLD RUSH” means we are third in the Medals Table, a table where it is mainly about the number of golds (silver and bronze columns see to be there for goal difference purposes). Which, incase you can’t see it with your eyes when they put the medal table up, means we are above Australia and Germany - which some people seem to think is significant. What I would also like to see is an actual medal table, of the actual number of gold medals we will be taking hime, bearing in mind that a few of ours would be in team sports. This would also make sense for those teams taking part in football, hockey and handball - where only one medal is available. It means we’d have six golds in the rowing, four in the sailing so far. It may also skew the other most ridiculous stat that is starting to be bandied around…

In a talkie bit on News 24 with the sports guy, the following assertation was made: “If you take out the achievements of Michael Phelps the UK has the same number of golds as the USA. Indeed if Michael Phelps was a country he would be fifth in the medals table”.

IF MICHAEL PHELPS WAS A COUNTRY? How would this work exactly? Can you be granted membership of the UN just because you are quite good at swimming. The GDP of Phelpsland one assumes would be from the sale of gold medals, which would need regular top ups every four years. And if Russia are so gung ho to go into Georgia, I think they would see an opportunity to regain their Olympic golory days and instantly send a tank in to Phelps to annexe him. Nevertheless feel free to send in what you think the flag if this autonomous, fast swimming nation would look like, so he can hoist it up his flagpole.

STEALTH NEWS MINUTES: Six
TOTAL OLYMPIC MINUTES: Twenty Five

It’s good to see that some people are still keeping this great event alive though:

*two of these were in the intercalated games of 1906 which kind of don’t count, BUT ANYWAY…

But there has been so much cycling. And so much swimming. And quite a lot of diving (though considerably less now we are rubbish at it). Put it like this, there has been more than I would expect from sports where you are racing over distances where one would think the medals may go to the best over 100m, 200m, 400m etc like in the athletics. Instead though the minor sports which make up the gravy of the Olympics are well aware that this is their one moment in the sun, every four years. And some of them have worked out the key part of making their sports seem more important: to have more versions of them so more medals are available.

A number of techniques it appears have been developed to do this, and here is your handy guide in case you want to beef up Handball (Hitler’s favourite sport):

Different Weight Classes: A great idea from boxing, it suggests that it is unfair that a shortarse should have to fight a beefcake. And perhaps it is true, but in rough and tumble fighting outside a pub, you don’t get to stop a fight because one of the protagonists is considerably lighter than the other. Nevertheless this idea has been stolen by many of the martial arts and in particular the weightlifting – where it seems that the basic question of this simplest of sports “how much can a human lift” has been bastardised to “how much can a human lift if that human weighs X”. A great way of multiplying the available medals in your sport, it also has the plus point of implicitly suggesting that the short and light people are effectively disabled and should be in the paralympics.

Diff’rent Strokes: This is one of the best innovations of swimming. Not only do they want to know how fast you can swim a certain distance, but they gve you different races for different ways to getting there. So Breast Stroke, Butterfly, Back Stroke, Freestlye (crawl) : WNY NO DOGGY PADDLE! Not only that but they then have a race where you do all of them, the awesomely names freestyle. Which means in total there are five different 400m races! Athletics is missing a trick here, the only time they have nicked this idea is for mincing walking. But imagine the 400m where each hundred is in a different syle. 100m running backwards, 100m hopping, 100m walking and 100m freestyle (probably running!) Get to it.

Synchro: Yes swimming but when I discovered synchronised diving the lightbulb tinged above my head. There seems very little implicit in the sport of diving that suggests that doing it synchronised with another person is anything but a bit hard – but not key to the development of the sport. Except it doubles the number of dives there are. Doing anything synchronised with someone else requires a lot of training, and why there is no synchronised gymnastics, or dressage I have no idea. Synchro pole vault, that would be good.

Multiplicity of equipment: This is posh sport heaven. Rowing and yachting seem to have hundreds of classes based on the number of different boats they can invent. It is almost worth it for the invention of the word Yngling. In gymnastics if they invented a new piece of awesome equipment tomorrow there could be a good chance that it got included – I am very keen on adding a bucking bronco to vault over.

Coached / non-coached: As an old cox myself, I am constantly impressed by the trick rowing played to double the events in their sport. Namely the version of their sport where they have a cox in the boat versus the coxless versions. Bearing in mind that the main job of a cox in river rowing is steering, and Olympic rowing takes place on a straight course, this is even more impressive. But surely other sports could benefit from this. Boxing with the trainer in the ring, cycling with the coach doing a backie.

Let’s team up: I like a good relay race (I like watching people drop the baton). But the “group pursuit” cycling seems like the oddest type of relay I have ever seen. And this suggests that you can make up any relay you like and call it a “team version”. Indeed the eventing and gymnastic teams are a way of squeezing another medal out of individual sports. They really should do it in weightlifting so we can discover the World’s Strongest Country.

So as you can see, I saw more sport in the last two day than I expected. Over ten minutes of blimmin’ cycling. Infact the only way to avoid it properly was to come and write this rant.

FOURTEEN PUSHBIKE MINUTES
NINETEEN OLYMIC MINUTES IN TOTAL

Yun Ok-Hee here is modelling a PINK bow, and a cartoon panda chest guard!

I think I might take up archery!

But before we get to 2012, let us consider last weeks opening ceremony. The Birds Nest Stadium is an impressive venue, and the Olympic district is packed with enough interesting buildings and boulevards to make this ceremony special. And the fireworks were very impressive. The opening synchronised drummers were also stupendous, down to the glow-stick drumming. It all started very well. But, well I think I can sum it up with two complaints.
-No giant inflatables
-No people in giant foam rubber suits. NOT EVEN THE MASCOTS.

The Olympic mascot should act as a clueless MC for the whole event. Oversize in uncontrollable inflatable form, or like a drunk giant in foam rubber, the mascots embody the essential silliness of doing the Olympics in the first place. A celebration of sports which by themselves are not very interesting, the Olympics gives gravitas to kayaking in a world which could not care less. The opening ceremony should be arty, should be ambitious and should be – like any mass art in a sports stadium – a bit silly.

China did not do silly. They tried to pack three thousand years of history into interpretive dance and hi-tech staging which was all very impressive but lacked the coherency of a giant inflatable panda rolling across a sea of people. We dreaded ten minutes of five hundred synchronised Ti-Chi martial artists, which we predicted. There were impressive bits: the giant planet at the end and the moveable type: but in the end Zhang Yimou threw manpower at the project and went for respectable. The invention of moveable type is important, but is it China’s killer app? Even when dancing like some sort of out-of-control robot? Or people drilled impressively inside boxes.

Which brings us to the BBC presentation of the opening ceremony. In the past they have been happy with Barry “I’ll commentate on anything for a tenner” Davies. He’s retired though and so the BBC struck some sort of truce between news, sports and arts coverage with Huw Edwards, Hazel Irvine and Carrie Gracie (who she?*). Huw tried to invest the whole thing with majesty – suggesting that we would be pleasantly surprised by how the did the movable type segment. We, rightly, guessed within a second, that there were people in the boxes. We were right and thus not surprised. Commentating on this type of thing is a thankless task, but the overall seriousness of the Chinese effort made it a lot easier than usual. The three presenters managed to find themselves special niches in the process:
HUW: To describe what we were seeing and say the word Undulating (FIVE TIMES)
CARRIE: To say what we are seeing is based on the theme of harmony (TEN TIMES) and Confucius (NINE TIMES).
HAZEL: To explain that in the eighties the contents of her wardrobe were mainly day-glo nu-rave outfits (the only piece of proper bonkers commentary).
So it looked nice, the gigantic scroll was impressive, but it was nowhere near silly enough to go down as a great. When rolling Sarah Brightman on at the end is the strangest part, you know it has failed in the mental. London 2012 will have urban street dance, an animatronic history of grime with a gigantic robot Wiley fighting a gigantic robot Dizzee Rascal and a holographic re-enactment of the battle of Britain. And a giant fellating foam rubber Lisa Simpson, AND BE ALL THE BETTER FOR IT.

(It will if I can get involved with it anyway!)

*She turns out to be another newsreader, this one, whose main qualification for being authoritative on Chinese culture is spending a year teaching English. To which I say Huw Edwards is Welsh, which is where the Inn Of The Seventh Happiness was filmed, so he knows AS MUCH AS HER.

Here’s a short clip of the last length. Katie Hoff (USA) is leading in lane 3, Adlington is in lane 5 (the upper yellow one). Look how Adlington suddenly zooms up from metres behind in the last 25m, and just touches out Hoff at the last inch:

Awesome stuff. Her teammate Jo Jackson had a superb swim as well to nab the bronze, and together their efforts have definitely lifted the British squad’s spirits after a hesitant start. The men’s 4x100 freestyle relay team put in a sterling effort to make the final (they only decided to bother fielding a team at all at the very last minute), and came within a couple of tenths of a second of the previous world record set by the American B-team in Sunday’s heats. Yes, the B-team. The A-team (Michael Phelps, Garrett Weber-Gale, Cullen Jones and Jason Lezak) knocked another four seconds off it again in the final, which is a staggering time, but even without a clock the race itself was a joy to watch (BBC video link). Somehow Lezak caught up Alan Bernard, who must have thought he had it sewn up. You really feel sorry for the French, but it means that Phelps’ eight golds target is still on track.

So what else has been going on in the pool? Well, world records have been tumbling all over the shop and there have been plenty of upsets for the Americans who aren’t in a ‘Phelps’ event:

Men’s 400m freestyle: Tae Hwan Park (KOR)
Women’s 400m freestyle: Rebecca Adlington (GBR)
Men’s 100m breaststroke: Kosuke Kitajima (JPN) - World Record
Women’s 100m butterfly: Libby Trickett (AUS) - Olympic Record
Women’s 400m Individual Medley: Stephanie Rice (AUS) - World Record
Women’s 4x100 freestyle relay: Netherlands - Olympic Record

The Americans were pretty much favourites for all of these events except the 100m butterfly and certainly expected to win most of them. Hard luck! The rest of the world is finally catching up with the USA. :)

Coming up tomorrow we have Hannah Miley and Keri-Anne Payne going in the semi-finals of the 200m Individual Medley, Caitlin McClatchey and Jo Jackson in the 200m freestyle semis, and Gemma Spofforth and Liam Tancock in the women’s and men’s 100m backstroke finals respectively. In recent Olympiads it’s been a rare sight to see a Brit in the final for anything, but right now you can see the confidence dripping off the British swimmers - they no longer seem intimidated by having world record holders or multi-medallists in the lane next to them, and are knocking seconds off their best times (except Rebecca - in her post-victory interview the first coherent thing she said was ‘I’m a bit disappointed with my time”). You can tell that the trusty BBC commentary duo of Andy Jameson and Adrian Moorhouse are having trouble keeping their excitement to a professional level as they watch.

So by all rights Team GB should bag themselves a few more medals by the end of the week! Let’s hope your correspondent isn’t suffering too much from sleep deprivation to bring you all the latest poolside action…

It’s a tough choice, tougher when you have a dude like gold medalist Zhang Xiangxiang in your event, performing first-time lifts which better anyone else’s best with ease. He failed his second lift on the snatch, but that was the only hiccup until he missed a world record lift right at the end - by then he had won gold easily and was doing it more to please the home crowd.

I liked the guy who got silver, a surprisingly rangy Colombian called Salazar (though this lower weight class doesn’t really attract man-mountains) who was the most delighted when he managed each lift, and I felt bad for a Korean who’d taken an early lead before three fails in the clean-and-jerk ended his Games. That’s the starkness of weightlifting: unlike the swimmers, runners, cyclists, etc. there’s no multiple events to promise redemption, and unlike the boxing and tennis you don’t work your way through multiple bouts. In the lifting, you really do only get one moment in the spotlight.

These lower weight classes have, as predicted, been a goldfest for China. Eyebrows have apparently been raised over the initial gold in the lightest women’s class, whose bulky winner managed an improvement in a year equal to over half her bodyweight. But what impressed me about Zhang Xiangxiang was his calm as much as his formidable strength. Oh, and his name, pronounced by the BBC commentator with all three syllables the same, like a weightlifting version of !!!

a) Is giganticism a kind of disability (door frames too low etc)? Hence shouldn’t basketball be in the Paralympics. Or maybe there should be a special division for people under five foot six playing basketball.
b) Basketball is a perfect example of a sport which humans have out-evolved to an extent that the game is completely different to the one originally intended.
c) In retrospect it was probably kind of dumb for the USA to have lobbied for certain sports that they were particularly good at to be involved in the Olympics. In the Baseball and Basketball they really are setting themselves up for a fall if they don’t win. (I know I am probably wrong in this, but the only way to get our Olympic loving statisticians to post is by deliberately provoking them!)
d) How do the US pick their national team (in this and the baseball)? Its kind of related to “how does anyone pick their national team” but in a professional sport where club competitions are paramount, is there an easy way to do this?
e) Whilst I have been told (three times in that minute) that basketball is massively popular in China, and Yao Ming is like the Chinese David Beckham, its still a bit odd that he was chosen to light the Olympic torch. Don’t you give that honour to someone who is a genuine gold medal prospect, which as far as I can see, is not the case with the Chinese basketball team no matter how much they like the game?
f) Actually, once a seven foot six bloke has got hold of the Olympic torch, its probably quite hard to get it off of him, so maybe that’s the explaination.

ONCE BOUNCY MINUTE. THREE OLYMPIC MINUTES IN TOTAL.

This morning it was an explosion at the rowing. Initially I was doubly excited. Finally the truth would be discovered that rowers actually rely on little motors under the boat. However it wasn’t that. Instead John Inverdale’s cro-magnon visage was explaining (by pointing) that the machine that made little bubbles to mark the finish line had blown up. Indeed behind him was clouds of thick smoke (admittedly difficult to distinguish from the smog) and a black smudge hole in the Olympic rings. Inverdale was predicting that this would soon be replaced, praising Chinese efficiency. I was just goggling at:
a) the fact they use a bubble machine to mark the finish line
b) that bubbles are seen to be rigourously accurate enough to MARK a finish line
c) that they got a shonky machine which on the first day of use blew up
d) that John Inverdale had not run off scared of the FIRE DRAGON, perhaps to run back to his cave to draw with the juice of some berries the trauma of the event.

Anyway, whilst marvelling at all of this, I saw a bit of a womens skulling pair race in which the hot favourites, the Chinese were pushed into, er, first place by the Czech’s and the Brits “would be disappointed with that”.
TWO MINUTES

But head over to the BBC page for television coverage of the Olympics and try viewing the listings for fencing. Strange, no? It hasn’t - like baseball - been voted out (baseball will make its last Olympics appearance in Beijing this year). It’s just not being shown by the BBC.

Back in June, when the BBC’s coverage was being hammered out once and for all, there was only one Briton expected to compete in any fencing event. That was Alex O’Connell, who’s handy with a sabre - one of the three swords in fencing along with epée (thinner) and foil (the thinnest). Since then, in a mysterious ruffling of cloaks, the sport’s international governing body has decreed that Finchley’s Richard Kruse - a foil man - and Martina Emanuel - also foil - will get to stab a little in Beijing.

Fencing isn’t one of those Olympic sports where you’re washed up by the time you’re university age. At 22, Emanuel is a little green for a fencer - she’s mainly trying to get experience for 2012. (She also trains, lives, and was born in Italy. Hmm. British mum, apparently.) But there are high hopes for 24-year-old Kruse, who some say is Britain’s best shot at the country’s first fencing medal since 1964.

Today, American Mariel Zagunis took the gold in women’s sabre. (Americans won bronze and silver, too). Zagunis thus repeats as gold medalist. She won in 2004 - the first gold for an American fencer in 100 years - after a last-minute reshuffle allowed her to join her compatriots in Athens. So there’s hope for Richard Kruse yet. It’s just too bad his friends won’t get to tune in. Especially after he took the time to present this “fencing for beginners” guide for… BBC Sport.

So who looked good? Italy did outclass the opposition in a 3-0 win, but I can hardly assume that Honduras are especially high quality. Argentina look very strong, but the Ivory Coast gave them a good game in losing 2-1. Holland and Nigeria both looked pretty good in a 0-0 draw.

On a side issue, why do commentators keep using the phrase “he plays his football in [country]” when we are seeing international football? Is there more information, denotative or connotative, than “he plays in”? Would we think they meant something other than football, or that he plays someone else’s football there?

On the sad side there has been a spate of British withdrawals from the games, the most notable being Frankie Gavin, lightweight boxer for not being enough of a lightweight. A strange accusation to level at a boxer, and one which in a pub situation would probably earn a punch, but he was a medal hope in a sport we often excel at (its punching people - v.British). Beth Tweddle is still in some of the gymnastics despite having a rib poking out of her chest injury. Injury’s are a sad way to go out, though perhaps its better than being roundly thrashed on the mat, but if our entire England team had to withdraw due to injury, we could spenc the next four years pretending we would have won everything.Which would certainly be the case if we were int he football.

Some of Freaky Trigger’s Olympic coverage, you will have realised reading Kat’s swimming piece, is being provided by writers who are genuine experts and enthusiasts in their field - as well as possessing a gift of bringing the drama of sport to you the reader.

Others, however, have chosen sports based on what was left over when everyone else had picked. Since this is very much how my participation in sports has always worked it seemed a fair method. Thus I introduce myself to you now as Freaky Trigger’s newly appointed weightlifting expert.

Weightlifting as a sport is both simple and mysterious. The simplicity comes from the fact that every single event in every single category at the Olympics is the same: no variance in victory conditions, rules or tactics, just in how enormous the participants are. The mystique comes from the fact that it’s never on the TV except when the Olympics come round, when it seems to fill up the whole schedule. Also, Britain don’t take part in it* so when I was small it seemed doubly baffling, as it was always there and yet nobody had anything much to say about it. It was dominated back then by the Eastern Bloc countries who were Our Enemies: while we concentrated on breeding a race of lanky fops good only for running away the iron men of Bulgaria and the DDR were busy practicing by lifting whole tanks.

Luckily times have changed! Here is what my literal half hours of research have uncovered about weightlifting so far.

The magic of weightlifting

Weightlifting is all about maximum individual effort. It does not seem to be a particularly tactical sport at the moment of competition (training and exercise regimes are another matter) - what’s needed is a combination of skill, power, and determination. Skill and power are familiar to us from other events, of course - the shot, javelin, or high jump - but what makes weightlifting uniquely compelling are two other factors in combination.

The first is the all-or-nothing nature of weightlifting. When you throw a javelin it goes a better or worse distance than your opponents. But weightlifting is more like the high jump - you either lift the weight cleanly or you don’t: no room for compromise or “good enough” or “puts you in contention”. The weight goes over your head or it doesn’t. And because the weight is such a big physical thing the fail in weightlifting truly is epic: the slang for failure in the sport is “bombing out”.

The second is the uniquely sustained exposure and pressure the weightlifter suffers. A high jump is over in a second or two: a clean-and-jerk can take up to two minutes before failure or success is confirmed. That’s two minutes alone on a stage, the audience (and worldwide TV audience), focusing on your every expression and movement as you try and focus on the enormous slabs of steel you’re trying to lift. It’s no surprise weightlifters seem to talk about the sport not in terms of competing against each other but in more individualist language: constantly striving to better their own personal physical limits, shutting out the rest of the sport and the world.

What will happen in Beijing?

There are mens and womens events, each divided into a half-dozen or so weight classes. Each contestant needs to do two lifts: the snatch, which is the lift done in one movement, and the clean and jerk, which is in two movements and involves heavier weights. The clean and jerk is the really dramatic one where you think the lifter is going to do themselves a mischief at the halfway point, and they drop the weights on the stage with an almighty bash if it goes wrong. The snatch is more a psychological battle where lifters just grip the bar, stare at it, and then walk away.

The winner is the person who hefts the biggest total weight over these two lifts.

So to Beijing: weightlifting is one of the events where China are looking to clean (and jerk) up, at least in the lower weight categories - they’re leaving the heavyweight ones to the traditional powerhouses from Eastern Europe and the Middle East (Iran is a big weightlifting nation). Most informed opinion suggests they will do so, and a lot of the interest will be in whether they can double up on the top medals, or whether a non-Chinese competitor can split gold and bronze. But of course, anyone can have an off day. The higher weight categories seem a bit more open: the superheavyweight mens looked set for an epic battle with the Iranian defending champion Hossein Rezazadeh hoping to win a remarkable third gold, but his doctors have informed him he must never lift again! Noes! But that event will still be exciting in his absence, and not just because of the stupendous weights being lifted: it is one of the few Olympic events which might well be won by a sitting MP. (Your reporter will of course be keeping a close ear on the unofficial SI units of weightlifting being used by the commentators.)

This being sport, the Australians seem in with a shout in a couple of areas too.

So far I have only found out much about men’s weightlifting: the women’s discipline isn’t as big news, and also has a long-standing image problem which it shares with certain track and field events: the imaginative jump from “unfeminine” to “not actually women” is easy to make. This is slightly unfair - in fact the entire sport across both genders seems to be riddled with doping with Bulgaria having already withdrawn its entire team for being drug-pumped weightbots.

Commentators have called for weightlifting to be withdrawn thanks to these scandals - this is unlikely to happen (cf that IHT article) as it’s a venerable Olympic sport. Also, for me anyway it’s harder to care about doping in weightlifting than in, say, cycling, where drugs are being used to give power an advantage over tactics and skill. In lifting, power is everything anyway: putting three times your bodyweight over your head on a huge metal bar is ALREADY completely freakish and eye-bulgingly mental, the monkey glands make a difference only in degree.

Stay tuned to FT for my virtual matside reports on the weightlifting events!

*(this is not wholly true - Britain’s one weightlifter in Beijing will be Michaela Breeze, who came 9th in her class in Athens and I remember seeing on Newsround where she came across as very nice and passionate about her sport. She said that to be a British female weightlifter was to plough a somewhat lonely furrow, which doesn’t really surprise me.)

To start you off, here’s a useful run-down of the rules in swimming competitions. The Olympic-specific bits are as follows:

- No 50m events except for the freestyle.
- Up to two swimmers per country are allowed to enter each individual event.
- 50m, 100m and 200m events have heats, semi-finals and a final; 400m, 800m and 1500m events just have heats and a final.
- The 10km is a new event this year, and is going to be held in the rowing lake, the water quality of which has been upgraded from ‘too polluted for any human use’ to ’suitable for industrial use and entertainment without direct touch of human skin’.

Swimming History 101

If you haven’t been paying attention, for the last decade or so swimming has been a straight-up contest between the USA and Australia. Before that the Americans were totally dominant, and from the mid-seventies up until 1989 the communist bloc was pumping its poor ladies full of steroids. Here’s the swimming medal table for the last five Olympiads:

(*For the purposes of this table I’ve tallied up the medals for Russia/CIS/Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Hungary, Poland and East Germany.)

Since 1992, most of the Russian/Eastern European medals shown above were won by a handful of superstar multi-medallists such as Krisztina Egerszegi (HUN), Alex Popov & Denis Pankratov (both RUS) and Yana Klochkova (UKR), whereas the American and Australian teams have unmatchable depth of talent - several crestfallen swimmers broke the existing world record in their Olympic trials this year but didn’t make the team as they still came in third! In fact, check out the relay team medal table (in brackets are the number of gold relay medals won):

Australia’s rise to power in world swimming shows absolutely no signs of stopping - this year their women’s team may well overtake the Americans. However, until the Herculean Michael Phelps retires the Aussie men will have to settle for second best.

Of course other countries partake in swimming too: Italy, France and the Netherlands have several world-class freestyle swimmers each, Japan is very strong where breaststroke is concerned and - amazingly - the UK women are finally starting to have an impact! What’s going on?

Team GB: sink or swim?

British swimming has been splashing about in the shallow end with its armbands on for decades. For comparison with the tables above, Team GB has won 8 swimming medals IN TOTAL since 1988 and NONE of those were by women - relying on the male breaststrokers and distance freestylers to scrape the odd medal.

We have historically performed very well at short course (25m pool) events, but when it came to the big competitions (all in 50m pools) we were left in the starting blocks. This wasn’t due to a lack of talent or even hard work: many of our top swimmers had lost the race before they even arrived at the pool. Add this poor psychology to our dire facilities and a non-existent national coaching programme and you can start to see why our best swimmmers would be off training on their own in the US or Canada. For an ‘individual’ sport, you might be surprised at the importance of being part of a strong team for swimmers, both in training and racing. Something had to be done to revive the UK’s fortunes.

Step up Bill Sweetenham, a successful Australian youth coach who shook things up a little in the GB camp after their dismal performance in Sydney 2000. Not all the swimmers were in favour of the changes, and there was a lot of muttering in high-up places about what exactly was going on. But Bill’s talent clearly lay in nurturing young hopefuls and instilling into them the proper competitive mindset needed to be the best in the world. The media obviously expected instant results (despite Sweetenham’s weary explanation that, as with Australia, it would take a while to build up a successful team) and as such Bill has since departed for pastures mysterious (’decided not to renew his contract’). But he set the wheels in motion, and the young Brits are now chomping at the bit for the chance to show what they can do.

The Girls

Our female freestylers are our best shot for a gold medal - yes, I said GOLD! Teenager Rebecca Adlington is ranked no.1 in the world this year for the 800m. She is terrifyingly fast even when in heavy training, and hopefully will do better than Becky Cooke’s 6th place over the same distance in 2004. Have a look at how her best time measures up:

Rebecca’s 8.19 is the fourth fastest time EVER, and she’s still got plenty more in the tank - her sights are set on the 400m as well. If she can hold off the Americans and Italians then HURRAY, double-medallicious!

Fran Halsall is a great little sprinter and could be up for a medal in the 50m or the 100m - world record holder Libby Trickett (AUS) probably has the gold sewn up here but the rest of the field is wide open. Caitlin McClatchey had a difficult 2007 and has sat just outside the world top ten this year for the 200m. However she clearly has a taste for victory after her two golds at the 2006 Commonwealths (beating Libby in a huge upset for the Australians), and has been working very hard this year.

Factor in Jo Jackson and Mel Marshall - solid world-class sprinters both - and we have the makings of our best 4×200m free team since well, ever. The Americans aren’t exactly quaking in their boots (not when they keep breaking the world record every other competition), but the Australians are apparently ‘not writing us off’! Blimey!

Elsewhere, Hannah Miley should definitely make the 400m Individual Medley final and could well get a medal if she can break her own European record, but she’ll have to absolutely swim out of her skin to do it. Her 4.33 time would have been a world record in Athens, but Katie Hoff (USA) and Stephanie Rice (AUS) will both be aiming to win in 4.30 or under. Jemma Lowe should be a finalist for the 200m butterfly and may well get a medal there too, but in the backstroke and breaststroke we’re still some way off the international pace for now.

The Boys

Cardiff lad David Davies seems to be on reasonable form to repeat his Athens bronze in the 1500m, though it’s hard to see anyone beating the legendary Grant Hackett (AUS) - Grant is looking for his third 1500m gold in three Olympics and will be unstoppable, barring him being run over by a bus or something. David is also swimming in the new 10km open water event - how this will go is anyone’s guess, especially as David is Scared of fish: “They’re not human. They don’t walk around. They’re different.” Oh dear!

Liam Tancock, Gregor Tait and James Goddard are all great backstrokers and Gregor at least should make the 200m final, but I fear the Americans are just going to be too strong for them. Liam holds the world record for the 50m backstroke but unfortunately that’s not an Olympic event. Sorry Liam! Chin up though, with a bit of luck you or James might get a bronze in the 200m IM instead?

Holding up the British men’s breaststroke tradition, Chris Cook has been rising up through the world top 20 for a couple of years now. He’s not that far off the top pace and won the 100m and 200m at the 2006 Commonwealths, but again he’ll have to pull out something spectacular to beat the Americans and the Japanese.

But you can’t even see their faces!

Swimming may just be a bunch of dudes going up and down in a pool, but it has its fair share of drama - the hot topic this year has been the Speedo LZR swimsuit which has apparently helped break FORTY-EIGHT world records this year. Some are calling it a cover-up for extensive doping, but I think it’s simply that Speedo has made a massive leap in its technology. If some swimmers want to take advantage of that then fine. Everyone else will just have to swim faster.

Still on the drugs theme, American breastroker Jessica Hardy discovered she had tested positive for clenbuterol (an asthma medication that improves lung capacity) just last week. She has tearfully denied everything, but it’s too late for appeals - she’s out.

There’s been a lot of hoo-haa about the finals being raced in the morning session (not just swimming - gymnastics too). This is unheard of in pretty much any sporting event (although a few morning finals were held in 1988 at Seoul), and is only happening in Beijing because NBC have signed a $3.5 BILLION dollar deal with the IOC so the Americans can watch it all at prime time. The Australians are NOT happy.

As well as their superhero Michael Phelps (who has been seen sporting a Mark Spitz ‘tache this week), the Americans will be spending their evenings watching Dara Torres, who at age 41 is competing in her fifth Olympics. Her first one was in 1984! She’s had more comebacks than All Saints. Unfortunately for Dara, last week her coach was diagnosed with a rare blood disorder and may only have days left to live. Yikes! Still, she’s not had it quite as bad as Laure Manaudou, who has had ‘lewd pictures’ of herself spread around the internet (allegedly) by her ex! The French freestyler has had a rotten year of it anyway, and has pulled out of 200m (in which she is the world champion). In fact, she’s thinking of packing in the freestyle altogether and switching to backstroke. Whatever you say, Laure!

Other brave soldiers: breaststroker Eric Shanteau was diagnosed with testicular cancer a week before the American Trials, but has decided he is going to swim the 200m anyway instead of going for surgery (!); world-record holder Liesel Jones has been on a soup-only diet for the last month (seriously, these breaststrokers need their heads looking at); Australian golden couple Eamon Sullivan and Stephanie Rice split up a couple of days ago and have lost all their joint sponsorship deals in the process (my heart bleeds for them, it really does) and last but not least, Kosuke Kitajima says that the food at the Olympic village is “the tastiest food I’ve ever eaten at any athletes’ village I have stayed at. I have gargled with the tap water too and that was fine I’m sure.” However there are NO BATHTUBS! The swimmers are unable to immerse themselves in water! Oh wait.

The Medal Contenders

Enough wittering. Here’s a quick run-down of my medal tips in each event:

Mens

Womens

The relay events will be dominated by the United States, with competition from the Italian and French men, and the Australian and British women.

And that’s your lot! Watch out for more updates once the Games get underway!

Sadly it appears that on Freaky Trigger, I am alone in this view. And so it falls to me, sipping my special edition Olympic Hatorade, to announce the comprehensive Olympic coverage on Freaky Trigger. You can get your Olympic fix from the BBC in High Definition, or on the radio in considerably less definition, but the proper Olympic analysis lives here. Basically, when I use the word comprehensive, I mean more in the sense that the Daily Mail uses it when discussing the education system: patchy, run-down and not fit for purpose. Think of our coverage as comprehenxive compared to the Eton of the BBC. And I know which I would rather be (and who I would rather punch in the face).

We have a crack team of reporters who wish they were in Beijing covering the athletics, posh sports and someone who owned a BMX once which qualifies them to comment on that. The anchor of our commentary will come from Olympic statistician extraordinaire Carsmile Steve, who will almost certainly mention the 1912 Swimming Obstactle course at least once. Talking of swimming Kat will be talking about this pointless splasharound and perhaps explaining why freestyle has not been renamed front crawl. Sarah will be looking at synchro swimming amongst other aspects and our own BAGA boy Alan will admire the young boys in The gymnastics. This is just part of the apparently keen and reverential coverage FT will give you starting next week on the 08/08/08*.

As for me, I will be trying to avoid the Olympics yet again. I will be trying to beat my own personal best of seeing only fifty nine minutes of coverage of the Athens Olympics – the edited highlights of which can be found on FT. So even if you are sharing my antipathy towards this celebration of 99.999% of the world being rubbish at stuff, you should still be able to enjoy FT during August. I’ll be in the cinema lots.

*The number eight is very auspicious in Chinese, as the word for eight sounds a bit like the word for money. So in Chinese, the Olympics are starting on Money Money Money!

In The Forbidden Kingdom, Jet Li pays the Monkey King with some awesome stick on whiskers. However it eschews the traditional story of Journey To The West and instead turns him into stone in the first third. This would be a waste of Jet Li, if he didn’t also play a mysterious monk who wants to save the Monkey King. In this his is aided in a fashion by Jackie Chan (after the obligatory meet-up misunderstanding) who appears to be reprising his breakthrough role as the Drunken Master. Both of them are actually aiding the Chosen One - who for some reason is a kung-fu fan teenager from Boston who has been transported in time for hilarious (read tedious) anachronism jokes. On the way the battle the Bride With White Hair, and hundreds of usual Wuxia army henchmen. Basically The Forbidden Army is a PG rated primer into kung-fu movies which should have been made twenty years ago. Not only would I have been young enough to enjoy it properly, but Chan and Li would have been young enough to make their pair really something special. Whilst they are impressive for old geezers, old geezers they remain and the film rests a little too much on their past glories. Whilst forgetting that in the meantime we’ve see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and possibly loads of other Hong Kong movies to make this kid friendly tale seem a little tame.

Nevertheless, there is something nice about seeing Li and Chan together. And like many Hong Kong classics, once it gets their obligatory fight out of the way, there is only one thing left to do. A sequence in which Jet Li pisses all over Jackie Chan. Literally. (When I mentioned this scene to a number of people they all reacted, unsurprised as if this is exactly what they expect from a Hong Kong action comedy). Here you can watch the highlight of the movie, where Jackie prayed for rain, but instead get u-RAIN:

So not a proper Monkey movie then. Though Stephen Chow is rumoured to be making one for 2010 - which would be something worth seeing. As, maybe, would be the Journey To The West opera which is on at the ENO at the moment which seems to be fortuitously timed with the BBC advertising it using it in for their Olympic coverage.

(By the way watch this space for OUR exciting Olympic coverage!!!)

Richard Williams of course is a music journalist of old and his argument is a bit more nuanced than any article which begins a sentence “If Manchester United and Chelsea can be seen as the King Crimson and Moody Blues of English football in 2008…” has a right to be. He’s not comparing the Championship and Premiership to punk and prog: he’s comparing them to pub rock and prog rock - though by the end he permits himself an apocalyptic vision of collapse and change which does draw on some familiar metaphorical wells. Something to contemplate, anyhow, as the Tarkus of Portsmouth prepares to meet the Roogalator of Cardiff this weekend.

—yog sothoth beyond the mountains of madness with the indescribable terror

—the winged fungus-beings in the outer dimensions with the unspeakable grimoire

—the crawling chaos at your study door with the aarrgh — !

(concept courtesy AL EWING and some foax playin the arkham horror rpg at the pembury last night)

as a game it has several evocative elements: problem being their evocativeness is often add-on orientalism introduced into the western version of the game; chinese mah jongg (as we saw in the film) is a fast-played social gambling game; i imagine ang lee had layered in certain plot/atmosphere/subtext elements which will have been lost on all non-players (not that i spotted any) (not that i really consider myself a player, tho i do sorta kinda remember the rules)

A: evocativeness, non-bogus and otherwise

The game itself is a bit like canasta: you have a hand of 13 tiles only you can see, you draw from a pack (except it’s the great wall of china) and discard onto a pile; the next player can either pick up your discard or pick up from the wall — the most basic hand is four sets of three and a pair, though there are all kinds of variant…

The shuffling is called the twittering of the sparrows and this is presumably non-bogus, since mah jongg means “sparrow game” or “sparrow tiles” — it’s called this because proper tiles chirp and clatter in a birdlike way when you swirl them on the table

The tiles are ordered (by everyone, very efficiently and quickly if they are practiced players) into a square of four touching walls (each two rows high and 18 long): this is the great wall of china, and you ensure the walls touch to keep the devils out

i’m quoting from the little book of rules i have, by one max robertson, pub. 1938, reprinted 1968: we bought it opposite the british museum after the whole family had seen the MUMMY (except i didn’t dare look at it just in case!) in 1971 or so (also we bought two nice little furry chinese dragons on cardboard bases but they came to pieces eventually)

anyway the book is mainly given over to “special hands”, which the chinese don’t use (or only some):

ones they do use:
UNIQUE WONDER: or 13 Grades of Imperial Treasure
One each of the 1s and 9s in all three suits, one each of the 4 winds, one each of the 3 dragons, one of thesde paired to go out
IMPERIAL JADE HAND
All tiles must be green: viz 2s, 3s, 4,s, 6s or 8s from the bamboo suit and plus MUST HAVE 3 green dragon!: usual hand-shape ie 3 fours and a pair
GATES OF HEAVEN
No winds, no dragons, all from a single suit, 3 1s, 3 9s, one each of 2-8, one of these to be paired to go out — all must be taken from the wall except the last which can be from a discard.

some hands in the book with less than kosher provenance :

GRETA’S GARDEN
one of each dragon, one of each wind, a run from 1-7 in one suit
GERTIE’S GARTER
“knitting” hand, viz ALL PAIRS, but the pairs = pair of 1s, pair of 2s, pair of 3s, pair of 4s, pair of 5s, pair of 6s and pair of 7s, in one or two suits only
HITLER’S BLUNDER
Run from 1-7 in same suit, pung of dragons (ie 3 of the same colour) and one of each wind

On the first page, in successive paras the author
a: quotes a disgruntled “chinese gentleman”:”We Chinese have played Mah Jonh one way for a thousand years, but you foreigners have played it a thousand ways in one year!”
b: then argues (surely correctly?) that “if all players would strictly adhere to this set of rules they would more or less become UNIVERSAL” — er yes
c: And continues (with monumental cheek, given the fact of HITLER’S BLUNDER et al): “After all, the game was invented by the Chinese and their rules should be followed as closely as possible”

B: mah jongg movies
Mahjong movies are a subgenre of Chinese gambling films that focuses on Mahjong games and over-the-top tile-playing skills. The movie can be either a comedy or an action movie (occasionally with distinctive elements of Chinese kung fu). The films, produced in Hong Kong, are often released during the Chinese New Year. Mahjong movies are very popular, particularly in some Asian countries. (this is copied from wikipedia)

* Kung Fu Mahjong 3 (2007)
* Bet To Basic (2006)
* Kung Fu Mahjong 2 (2005)
* Kung Fu Mahjong (2005)
* Teenage Gambler (2003)
* Fat Choi Spirit (2002)
* Mahjong Dragon (1996)
* Why, Why, Tell Me Why? (1986)
* Mahjong Horoki (1984)* Mahjong Heroes (1981)