What a loser

I think this has got to be the worst moment in the 2008 Olympics, even surpassing the atrocities (if any) committed by the Chinese security agencies against any Tibetans (didn't hear anything, but doesn't mean nothing happened). I mean, how could you have the audacity to kick the ref? This isn't even football. As a student of karate, I know for a fact that students of any martial art are also taught the aspects of discipline that are so tightly coupled with the martial arts. I guess communist Cuba, or at least Angel Matos and his trainer didn't have time for that. I just wish he was arrested by the Chinese police for some charge, and thrown into prison for life - I'm hoping the governments of the two communist regimes could come to an understanding and have him drowned in the yellow sea, or worse, he could be made to eat whatever the Chinese eat, and only raw at that. I'd like to see him kick his way outta that one.

We won a couple more

We won, we won,
we got 'em on the run,
with a yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum,
Olympic glory, here we come!

2 more medals,a bronze and the other one will at least be a bronze. Sushil Kumar won a bronze for the country in wrestling after 56 years. The first person to win it, K D Jadhav, achieved the feat in the '52 Helsinki games.







At the end of the day, Vijender Kumar, the third of our pugilists who made it to the quarter-finals in their respective weight categories, made it past the quarters in to the semis, and so has assured us of at least another medal. With his Grecian looks, this guy ought to be walking the ramps, and not getting punched, although punching others in the face is quite OK :)

India's best sporting achievement

Finally, we win a medal at the Olympics, and what a medal it was! It can't get better than gold, unless it's a clutch of gold medals, but nonetheless, an individual gold medal, the first in our history...wow! This sure as hell beats the sporting glory our country achieved when we won the 1983 Prudential world cup at Lords and the inaugural T20 world cup that we won last year in South Africa. And I'm not even taking into account the hockey teams' feat of 6 consecutive Olympic golds. Also, this isn't to say that an individual triumph is better than a team victory (for one thing, they shouldn't even be compared), but it's the occasion, the magnitude and the ramifications of the victory that decide which was better. When Leander Paes was asked which was the finest victory in his career, he didn't mention any of his grand slam victories, or even his victory over Pete Sampras, but the bronze medal he won at the 96 Atlanta Olympics. And the reason was simple, according to him: at Wimbledon and elsewhere, it would read, 'Leander Paes & Mahesh Bhupathi - Winners', but at the Olympics it said 'India - 1 medal'.

The cricket team of the past (1983) and the current crop that won the T20 world cup deserved every bit of the plaudits that they received, and you can't blame them that cricket isn't a sport in the Olympics where they could perform and try to win a medal for the country on a world stage of this size, but then again, our athletes who make it to this theater of athletic and sporting pinnacle don't get paid the way our cricketers do, and so it's only fair that they be given a slightly larger share of the plauditary pie; even our cricketers wouldn't mind it for sure.