New Zealander Valerie Vili is listed in the Olympic program at 6′3, 242 pounds. Apparently, security guards at Beijing National Stadium didn’t read that program.
Vili, who won the gold in women’s shot put Saturday night, raced off to see her coach and get a New Zealand flag to celebrate once she knew she had beaten the field. Unfortunately, both her coach and the flag were on the opposite side of the track near the front row of a packed stadium.
A female member of the stadium’s security staff who is described by AFP as “an over-enthusiastic but smaller security guard,” stepped up and tried to stop Vili from running off. The key word there, was “tried.”
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Remember that cool visual during the Opening Ceremonies on Friday of a helicopter tracking firework footprints going across the Beijing skyline, leading to the stadium? THE TELEGRAPH reported that it was lie, created by CGI and inserted into the broadcast coverage in order to spruce things up a bit. How would that make you feel about the reality you’ve created for yourself? I’m trying to free your mind, Neo.
The organizers claim that fireworks did happen - it would have been impossible (and too dangerous for the helicopters) from them to capture it live. So, they did the next best thing: spend six months working on CGI footage to insert into the broadcast.
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Posted by
ryan on Aug. 09, 2008, 11:00am
The 2008 Summer Olympics are officially underway after possibly the most spectacular opening ceremony in the history of the event. It took seven years of planning and billions of dollars, but the four-hour exhibition was considered a resounding success.
Unsurprisingly, security was tight, in part because of the threat of terrorism, but also due to protesters angry at China’s record on human rights, media freedoms, and air pollution concerns.
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The Olympic Games have not even started yet, and the U.S. is already being stripped of a gold medal for doping. Today, the International Olympic Committee stripped gold medals from the U.S. men’s 1,600-meter relay team that competed at the 2000 Olympics thanks to Antonio Pettigrew’s admission that he was doping at the time.
Pettigrew, who admitted in court in May that he used EPO and human growth hormone from 1997 to 2003, along with teammates Michael Johnson and twins Alvin and Calvin Harrison who ran in the final along with Jerome Young and Angelo Taylor who ran in the preliminaries were all stripped of their gold medals. FOX NEWS.COM reports, this is “the fourth gold and sixth overall medal stripped from that U.S. track contingent in the past eight months for doping.”
Johnson, the world record holder in 200m and 400m and probably the only member of this team who didn’t need to sell his gold medal for a sandwich or HGH, “already said he was giving it back because he felt ‘cheated, betrayed and let down’ by Pettigrew’s testimony.
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Chinese authorities announced that suspicious-looking females will be forced to take a gender test at next month’s Olympic Games.
TIMES ONLINE reports, “To ensure that girls will be girls, officials have set up a sex-determination laboratory where they say that tests will be conducted with the utmost delicacy by four experts from the Peking Union Medical College Hospital.”
What exactly does “girls will be girls” mean? They won’t tell you why they’re mad and force you to figure it out, or maybe they’ll take your credit card and go on a shopping spree to buy stuff they don’t need? Is that what the Chinese officials mean? Not exactly.
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Last month we introduced you to Fletcher Thornton, a member of USA Judo’s executive board. No we didn’t literally introduce you to this guy, that would be a little scary - especially if you were a teenage girl.
We introduced you to the allegations that Thornton drugged and sexually molested teenagers he had coached in the late 1970s. The allegations that came to light as a result of a blog post written by one of USA Judo’s top athletes, Ronda Rousey on her own Web site and message posted on JUDO FORUM. Along with these allegations, Rousey also mentioned that USA Judo had ignored the accusations against Thornton.
Today THE NEW YORK TIMES reports that Thornton has resigned, “A statement by USA Judo said that Thornton resigned Friday, effective at midnight. He was in Orlando, Fla., to referee Junior Olympic matches at Walt Disney World on Friday.”
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• Desperately seeking an image boost, Alex Rodriguez bags another big name in Hollywood - William Morris. Darren Rovell of CNBC is “disinterested” in the Yankee’s move to the talent agency and has a body of evidence to back it up.
• FANHOUSE salutes NBA Summer League icon Nate Robinson. After four consecutive seasons playing in games that do not count, the Knicks guard earned the honor of being the first player ever to have his Summer League jersey retired.
• HOT MOUSE PADS was too busy looking for photos of everyone’s favorite pole vaulter to realize that the Beijing Olympics would sadly be Allison Stokke-free.
• BBC NEWS painstakingly sat through an LA Galaxy vs. New York Red Bulls game to supply us with this puff piece on David Beckham’s impact on MLS and this photo, which I guess is evidence that the league is in better shape than it was year ago. Google image searches for girls with the letters of Tyler Twellman’s name across their mid drift came up empty.
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Posted by
admin on Jun. 30, 2008, 12:45pm
Via AWFUL ANNOUNCING, we are alerted to today’s wonderful accidental headline of the day, the morning after sprinter Tyson Gay runs a wind-aided 9.86 in the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic Trials.
Apparently, a news service called ONE NEWS NOW run by the highly conservative American Family Association has a little filter that changes words automatically. Thus, as OUT SPORTS discovered: Tyson Gay becomes Tyson Homosexual. Read more…
In a war-torn country like Iraq, the re-building of a soccer team was one of the few bright lights for the populace, a rallying point — particularly when the team won the Asian Cup last year by beating Saudi Arabia. Now, that group of players and rallying point for a country is in limbo, as the Iraqi Football Association has disbanded the team and fired its coach Adnan Hamad.
(The Iraqi team is likely in a much less jovial mood than shown in this Asian Cup photo.)
The team missed the final qualification for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa with a loss to Qatar on Sunday, and part of the IFA’s reasoning behind the disbanding is a need for more government cash in order to lure foreign coaching talent.
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